Long before my years as a startup CTO, I was a DJ. Before that, I played lead guitar in a band and burned CDs for my friends. Before that, I was a kid drawing on everything.

This talk is about what happens when you stop treating your creative life and your engineering career as separate things. I'll walk through five skills from the DJ booth that shaped how I build software. Reading a room is user research. Mixing live is production debugging. Knowing when the crowd is done with a track is feature deprecation.

Optional live demo: a Pioneer DDJ-REV1 driving real-time visuals built in JavaScript. This is the same audio-visual work I presented at Philly JS Club and FamCon.

For anyone who has felt their non-technical passions don't belong on a resume.

Adaptable to 5, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 90-minute (workshop) formats. Includes an optional live DJ hardware demo with a Pioneer DDJ-REV1. Related audio-visual work presented at Philly JS Club (September 2025) and FamCon (September 2026). Target audience: developers, creative technologists, and anyone with a non-traditional path into tech.