Despite working in an open plan office, I don’t tend to wear headphones at work much these days. This is partly because quite a big part of my job is talking to people, but mainly I am nosey and want to overhear conversations people are having around me. I especially want to overhear conversations where a colleague might be stuck on something, in case I can point them in the right direction (or save them 3 hours of digging around in the codebase). Earwigging is also useful if you know that someone’s conversation is likely to end with the words ‘let’s ask Kat’.

There are times of course when I need to get my head down and write some complicated code, or write a long document, and I’ll need to stick some music on to not get distracted by surrounding noise. I can read/review OK with background noise, but for some reason writing is much harder for me.

But what to listen to? Over the years I have narrowed my criteria for the best ‘coding’ music to:

  • Familiarity: If it’s something new, I’ll either be a) concentrating on the music to form an opinion on it, b) realising I don’t like it and will be thinking about putting something else on, or c) realising I do like it and immediately dropping everything to tweet ‘OMG WOT A BANGER’ or similar.
  • Lyrically simple: Sorry Bob Dylan, but lots of words in a song might as well be another conversation in the room, and the whole point is to get away from that. If I’m really familiar with the song, the lyrics often drift over me anyway, but if I like a song specifically because of its lyrics then it’s no good here.
  • Maximalism: I love minimal techno but plinky-plonk down-the-sink ubercoolische stuff has too much space in it to block out the surrounding noise (but that sense of space is why I like minimal techno in other contexts).
  • Propulsiveness: The higher the bpm, the faster I type! Even if it’s not that fast, a bit of chugging disco/motorik is great to keep the momentum up.

What this means in practice is that I end up listening to either old Nine Inch Nails albums or my self-curated Spotify playlist of Ibiza Classix 1997-1999. I see no problem with this.