Covers as a way of learning music and code

Summary

When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it. Music is, mostly, subjective: there's not an objective right or wrong way to do things. And that can make it really hard! Each of these skills is then couched in this subjectivity of trying to see if it's good enough. Playing someone else's music, making a cover, is great because it can make it objective. It gives you something to check against. When you're playing your own music, you're in charge of the entire thing. You didn't play a wrong note, because, well, you've just changed the piece! But when you play someone else's music, now there's an original and you can try to get as close to it as possible. Recreating it gives you a lot of practice in figuring out what someone did and how they did it. It also lets you peek into why they did it. Maybe a particular chord voicing is hard for you to play. Okay, let's simplify it and play an easier voicing. How does it sound now? How does it sound with the harder one? Play around with those differences and you start to see the why behind it all. * * * The same thing holds true for programming. One of my friends is a C++ programmer and he was telling me about how he learned C++ and data structures really well early on: He reimplemented parts of the Boost library. This code makes heavy use of templates, a hard thing in C++. And it provides fundamental data structures with robust implementations and good performance. What he would do is look at the library and pick a slice of it to implement. He'd look at what the API for it is, how it was implemented, what it was doing under the hood. Then he'd go ahead and try to do it himself, without any copy-pasting and without real-time copying from the other screen. Sometimes,...