Before I was a CTO, I was a DJ. Before I was a DJ, I was burning 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 specific skills I learned from DJing and making art that directly shaped how I build software and lead a technical team from reading a room (user research) to mixing live (production debugging) to knowing when the crowd is done with a track (feature deprecation).

You'll hear real stories from the DJ booth and the deploy terminal, and walk away with a framework for finding the engineering lessons hiding in whatever weird creative thing you do on the side.

This talk is for anyone who's ever felt like their non-technical passions don't belong on their resume.

Adaptable to 5, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 90-minute (workshop) formats. Includes optional live DJ hardware demo with Pioneer DDJ-REV1.

Previously spoke at PhillyJS on real-time audio visualization. Target audience: developers, creative technologists, anyone with non-traditional paths into tech.