nothing could have prepared me for the emotional difficulty of learning music production. 6+ years in, still oscillating daily between feelings of competence and cluelessness with peaks/valleys way more intense than i've experienced with any other creative outlet

people talk a lot about self-doubt and "impostor syndrome" with programming, but honestly as long as your code does what it's supposed to, doesn't crash, and other people understand it, it's already at "professional quality". just so much more objectively measurable and provable

but music isn't really at professional quality unless it sounds good to you/other musicians/normal people, affects people emotionally, people like it enough to voluntarily seek it out & listen to it etc -- and the path achieving all of those goals is extremely ill-defined