Blending Tech and Tunes with Daniel Phiri – Techstrong Unplugged EP24

Hey everybody and welcome back to Techstrong Unplugged. I'm your host, Atan Solomon, and this episode 24 of our series. In this episode, we're taking you to view Con 2024 at vConf.

Our Cosst Cassandra Chen met up with Daniel Fury, a developer experience engineer at Aviate, and he shares how his love for music intersects with his work in technology. He also discusses the creative process behind his music, the accessibility of AI and the unique projects he's built that showcase the potential of modern technology. Without further ado, let's head over to Vu Con 2024.

Welcome back to Textual Unplugged. I'm Cassandra Chin, and today we're here with Daniel. Thank you.

Cassandra, Can you introduce yourself? Sure. Uh, my name is Daniel Puri.

I'm a develop experience engineer at a company called Wate. Um, and I like to make music in my free time. You say you like music, like what kind of music do you like making or enjoying?

I, that's a great question. I enjoy all types of music, specifically creating music. I really like ambient music 'cause it helps me connect with, uh, nature.

I go on a lot of hikes also, and so I make recordings of my hikes and I put those in my music creation software and make, make ambient music. I think it's really interesting that you like ambient music. Yeah.

Because it's not like the first thing that comes to mind when I think of genres. No, not at all. It's, uh, it's more of like an appeal to relax and like connect with myself and connect with nature.

And I feel like ambient music is way less objective in what you want to create. It's more of you work with what you get and then you make something that you find beautiful and very personal to yourself. So, um, that's why it stands out for me.

I would recommend. So you said you actually create the music yourself? I do, yes.

Um, and it's a very manual process of listening to, to the recordings that I make and adding a bunch of instruments over that. Uh, yeah, it's, it's super fun. And I, I think I got into this mostly because I'm, I grew up using computers and I've liked electronic music and I think just like music software has made creating and expressing yourself in that way, way more accessible, which I absolutely love.

Can You kind of describe like the entire process of creating a song start to finish? Yes. Um, there's always this joke with artists, right?

Like a song is never finished. You just stop telling yourself this stuff to work on. And so usually you start with an idea or an emotion, like specifically for me.

And I, I try and connect that to what I want to express. And with ambient music, that's usually like slow and the music sort of unfurls. And then I add some, some drums.

I try and add some resistance. I work with space and so basically you get your sample, put that in the software, right? Um, just like look for happy accidents.

There's no set process I guess, and something, something works out at some point and once you have an idea of all the elements that you want to work with, you start to arrange them in the way that you want the music to come out. So it's a lot like, it's a lot like a puzzle. You have all these pieces, you get the pieces and then you start to, to put them in this, in this shape, but it's a puzzle that you choose.

Another thought that making music could be like a puzzle. It's not something that like jumps out when you think about making music, but um, yeah, like I, I really enjoy problem solving and when I think about what, what would make me want to make music, it makes it much easier to do and I think of it as like a problem that I want to solve and you have a start and some sort of end, you know, I dunno if that makes sense. Has your interest in music helped you want to get into technology?

I, I wouldn't say so, no. Um, so I've always been a fan of like electronic music in general. Um, I think as I answer your question, I think about it.

I'm like, probably yes, because a lot of people who make electronic music are extremely nerdy. Like they build the software that they use to make the music right. Um, and so I think exploring that helped me discover a lot of different, different softwares.

Um, I don't think I'm that in depth yet where I'm like making my own plugins, for example. Um, but yeah, I think there's definitely an aspect of music that made me interested in pursuing a software related career. I think it's interesting you didn't realize it yourself, that like your hobbies can actually help your work a little bit.

You know, it's, there's like stuff that you never realize until you think about it. So yeah, I find it interesting also, but now I learned something about myself, so thank you. So like, how did you get started into technology?

So this I can track down. Um, my, my, my parents always had computers around and I was always like, I was always the kid who would work on people's phones or like fix their settings. And so I grew up in Zambia, um, in the early two thousands.

And around that time the internet was only just developing. And so like, we did have YouTube when I was, when I was a child, um, we had these like phones and we'd browse the internet on like these Java browsers and one of my neighbors gave me a, an old laptop from the nineties. Um, like it used floppy disks.

I don't know if you've, you've used something with like floppy disks before. I've heard of them, but I think they're a little beyond my time. They're, They're very old.

Um, they were old for me also, like, it, it was like an old laptop that they just gave to me. It ran Windows 95, um, which I don't think is supported anymore. Like a lot of people use it now for like these retro themes.

I think you might know like the retro boxy windows. Um, but yeah, my actual laptop had that and I started playing a lot of minesweeper. Um, have you played that?

Yeah, I've played it online before. It's a great game. Yeah.

But didn't realize it dated back that far. It, it's, it's probably one of the first games that was on a Windows machine that, and, um, pinball, it's like a very classic pinball game. Um, anyway, uh, that's a tangent.

So that, that laptop really opened up a lot. Um, and one of my uncles who's always done like marketing, um, he used to work at Coca-Cola. He introduced something called Jula to me, which was a competitor to WordPress.

So you would use that to make websites and it was just like in passing, I was like, this looks boring. Um, I didn't really pay attention. And then one of my friends made a website and I was like, this is so sick, let me do that.

Um, and so I was like, I was hooked. I got into like computer science class in high school and we would create websites with like HDML and CSS and I was like, okay, I really enjoy this process of building stuff, right? Like I would have an idea in my head, I would go in my laptop and I would translate that to something real and it was like, it was a good feeling.

And so I kept looking for that. I think that's really cool. Yeah.

Do you still tinker with websites Quite a lot? Yes. Um, I think that's one of my favorite things.

I, I like to think of myself as like a, an artistic person and so, well there's like, I like to think of myself as an artistic person, but also I have like way too many ideas that I'm just like, let's get this from the head and let's do this. And that's my favorite thing about the web. It's so quick in terms of how fast you can get something from, Hey, let me get a website and let me, like, let me put my image on a screen right.

And ship this. And yeah, I do a lot of tinkering. I build just like funky applications.

I do like timers. If it's a friend's birthday, I would build like a custom timer with like these funky stickers and then put it on the internet, send it to them, and then it's just like my way of expressing myself. And that gets really cool.

You can build something quickly and just, you know, it's really personal. Yeah, that too. Yeah, it's, uh, it also comes with time.

Like I think when I started it wasn't as quick, but I was really, I didn't think about it as a challenge. I thought about it as I wanna do this really fun thing for my friend or my, my mom or um, my neighbor. And that really pushed me to get better.

Is this still more of a hobby or do you do it in your job? Hmm, a bit of both. Um, it's very different types of things that I build for my job and things that I build for myself.

An example of that is I have this website, um, called Lusaka My Love, which is basically a visual journey on a website that goes through poems that I write and pictures that I took. So Your custom Website, my own custom website, yeah. Um, and so like my job doesn't need me to do that.

Um, but for my job I do build a lot of these applications to showcase how different technology works. And today I'm speaking and I'll be demoing something that I built. Like if you use an iPhone and you have your gallery, right, you have the ability to search through your images, right?

If you have a bunch of images or your cat that you took five years ago and you wanna find them, you could just type cat and then your iPhone shows them, right? Ideally. And so I built a demo like that in VJS and so it's a, Um, how does it actually like find cats?

Is it AI related? It is AI related, yeah. It's, uh, so the technology behind it is something called, uh, vector search.

And so we use these machine learning models to sort of get an idea of what images are. And so you put your images in a store and you store them somewhere and you create these representations of those images called embeddings. And what you do is you search through those embeddings and it understands what's in an image in a language that computers understand.

And once you have that you can search through images like really, really easy. Yeah. It's really cool how it can do that now.

It's so impressive. Um, that's the really nice thing about technology also. It's, it's always changing and new stuff is getting more accessible for everyone.

You said that technology works for iPhone. Have you considered like Android or other kinds of devices? Uh, yeah.

So the demo i I made is a website actually, so it would work anywhere. Um, the example of iPhone is just like, it's something that was traditionally only on iPhones, right? Very close.

No one else could do that. But now with AI it's way more accessible. So now you could use it literally anywhere.

So now you're showing that really anyone can do it. Anyone can, yeah, it's way more accessible and approachable. Also, I think AI was very closed off previously where like you people had to, I think a lot of people thought you had to go to like the best schools or, uh, study for 20 years to understand how to do these things.

But now it's just, you can spend time on YouTube, you can read up a couple papers and you could build incredible stuff. When did you start getting into ai? Great question.

So I studied, uh, computer science in university and my, my last year I did a paper on uh, these very specific AI models that work with, uh, images, so they understand images called, uh, convolutional neuro networks. And so that was six years ago. Yeah, so it's like six years.

So you've actually been engaging for, with AI for quite a while. I, I took a pause after my undergraduate, um, and then over the past year I, I got back to it. So you could say it's like a year.

Do you enjoy your work with ai? Does it feel new? It feels, it's a good balance of new and familiar because I spend a lot of time doing it.

Um, and it's, it's always a challenge just because like I said, it's like people are always pushing these boundaries and figuring out new ways of doing things. Um, and for me, a lot of my job is taking these very seemingly complicated things and making them way more accessible for everyone else to use. 'cause I think there's a big fear with people using ai, uh, that it's this really complicated thing and I, I would like people to believe that it's not.

When you say people, do you mean like other developers or kind of like consumers, Other developers? Yeah. So like a lot of AI is done in Python and it's, it's a very, um, research heavy field.

And so a lot of people who don't do research feel like this isn't something they can do. And so other developers who want to utilize AI and aren't researchers think, oh, this isn't for me. But I don't believe that, I think anyone can do it if they want to.

So, Um, I think we've had a really good chat today. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you For having me. A lot of interesting stories and I really like your touch on music.

Yeah. Happy to talk to anyone for a long time about music and yeah, you could catch me anytime if you wanna continue. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you Cassandra.