“That Great GRETSCH sound!”
I’m camera shy. Genuinely. The kind of shy where I’ll rewrite a caption five times before I’ll record ten seconds of my own voice.
So it caught me off guard when I picked up my guitar this week, hit record, and posted it. No script, no second take, no editing out the rough parts. Just a minute of me playing, uploaded exactly as it happened.
Here’s the part that makes it a little ironic: I actually have a degree in film and TV production. Multiple angles, lighting, clean cuts, sound editing — I know exactly what a polished take looks like. I skipped all of it. One phone, one minute, one take.
I don’t play guitar because I’m good at it. I play because creating music, my own songs makes me happy, and it gives me a place to put my head when everything else is loud — work, job hunting, trading, five projects running at once. It’s the same reason I picked up code, the same reason I picked up a soldering iron for the Pi builds. Making something is the point, not mastering it on the first pass.
Hermann Hesse put it better than I can: “Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object.” It’s not a thing you land on. It’s something you keep doing.
Here’s the part that actually connects this to everything else I write here: that guitar video is the same policy I already run on every article, every build log, every line of code I publish. No cleanup pass. No waiting until it’s polished enough to be impressive. Just what actually happened, mistakes included.
I’ve written before about a bug in the Arb Series that I genuinely thought was fixed months ago — a gap calculation that was still wrong in production, still running with the old flawed math, long after I’d told myself (and you) it was patched. I didn’t rewrite that history when I found it. I wrote about finding it. That’s not a flaw in the brand, it’s the actual point of the brand: you’re watching someone build in real time, which means you’re also watching them get things wrong in real time.
A one-take guitar video with zero production value is a small, low-stakes version of the same discipline. If I can post that — camera shy, no edits, no do-over — then I’ve got no excuse to sit on an article because the code isn’t perfect yet or the write-up isn’t clever enough.
Life’s short. There isn’t enough of it to spend making everything look finished before you’re willing to show it to anyone. So this is me, badly playing guitar for a minute, and also me, still writing about pools that drain and bugs that hid in plain sight for months. Same policy. Different instrument.
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