Under The Hood It’s All Pop

Why developers argue like music fans

I’m going to tell you a secret.

Something teenage me would probably find deeply humiliating.

I love pop music.

22 by Taylor Swift is in my coding playlist. So is 1999 by Charli XCX.

And no, it’s not just because I’m a numbers guy.

Despacito, The Nights and good 4 u are all in there too.

I know.

Half of you are wondering what the big deal is.

The other half have already stopped reading.

But I grew up deep in the alternative rock scene. A confession like this could probably have got me exiled from the venue.

Music is tribal, man.

People treat your taste like it reveals who you really are.

Then sometime in my 30s I realised something slightly hilarious: half of my favourite “alternative” bands were secretly writing pop songs the entire time.

Alkaline Trio. Nirvana. The Offspring. Even Slipknot.

These were pop melodies in a plaid shirt.

Because underneath all the aesthetics, distortion pedals and tribal identity stuff, a great songwriter is still a great songwriter.

A song that makes you feel something still works whether it’s played on a guitar or surrounded by synthesisers and glitter.

One scene into another

When I first started learning to code, the last thing I expected was for developer culture to remind me so much of the music scene.

I started my career at an agency where almost everyone was a JavaScript dev.

Even people who love JavaScript will usually admit that the language is slightly insane.

It’s become more refined over time, but back then it was peak weird.

What started as Stockholm Syndrome slowly evolved into familiarity, then affection and eventually outright adoration.

This was my language.

It had its own culture, humour, aesthetics and worldview.

But it wasn’t until I moved to another agency filled with backend engineers, mobile developers and people from completely different technical backgrounds that I realised I’d accidentally joined some kind of technological culture war.

Suddenly everyone had opinions about what counted as a “real” programming language.

Which frameworks were respectable.

Which developers were “proper engineers”.

It felt weirdly familiar.

Underneath all the technical arguments, it was basically the same identity game I’d already seen play out for years in music scenes.

Taylor doesn’t care about genre

Ironically, around this same period I became slightly obsessed with metal covers of pop songs.

Oh, and metal covers of Disney soundtracks.

Yep. That’s apparently a real genre.

Around then I also did something that felt vaguely transgressive: I started learning iOS development.

It didn’t stick long term. The pull of React Native was ultimately too strong.

But the experience taught me something important.

The syntax, tooling and debugging workflows were different, but underneath it all the core ideas felt almost outrageously familiar.

APIs.

System design.

State management.

Databases.

UX.

Trade-offs.

This wasn’t “selling out”. It was just looking at the same problems from another side of the room.

And honestly, I think most of our industry tribalism works the same way.

Frontend vs backend.

Web vs mobile.

Design vs development.

PHP vs JavaScript.

Different aesthetics.

Different tooling.

But far more shared craft underneath than most tribes would ever want to admit.

A good developer is a good developer.

You don’t suddenly become a worse engineer because you chose JavaScript over Python any more than someone becomes a worse songwriter because they swapped distorted guitars for synthesisers.

Different genres. Both capable of great music.

I’m not embarrassed about my music taste anymore.

A great tune is a great tune.

And a great app is a great app.

It’s a love story, baby. Just say yes.