Paul Davis (fellow human being and author of the Ardour DAW) suggested on Twitter that we should have a conversation which would be recorded and available for download/stream via the internet on-demand (apparently this is a thing now?).

It seemed like a reasonable (or dare I say interesting, given our common experiences) suggestion, and generally my willingness to talk to people has a sort of vaguely gaussian curve where the X axis they want to talk to me and the Y axis is how willing I am to talk to them: if they don't want to talk to me at all, or if they REALLY want to talk to me, then I'm pretty much not interested, but if they're in the middle, then sure why not?

We had our interview (which was enjoyable, and it even would have been without a pasty on my desk staring me down for when it was over) using NINJAM in voice chat mode, which mostly works amazingly well, until it doesn't (and then you have to reinitialize the channels -- I've been meaning to fix that for years but meh). I haven't (nor will I likely) listened to it in its entirety, but hopefully I didn't make too much of a fool of myself (thank you Paul for editing it). Paul also is being very modest about his interviewing skills, I thought he did an excellent job (for an emacs user), but we're always our biggest critics (except those instances where you get asshole critics, but to be fair they are usually just assholes and not so much critics).

Anyway, here's the interview.

One final note, after our conversation I do find myself wondering how good of musicians we would both be by now, had we not chosen to write DAWs and instead had spent the last 36 collective years with our time devoted to playing rather than programming. It's a completely unknowable and unrealistic question, anyway: whether or not you consider programming an art, it shares with art the most difficult part which is maintaining an interest in a particular thing for extended periods of time. Would I be an amazing guitarist if I'd spent the last 15 years playing guitar for 8 hours a day? Probably. Could I possibly spend 15 years playing guitar for 8 hours a day? No chance in hell.