I’m Daniel Griffiths. I live in NC, where I write code and make music.

I’ve loved creating things for as long as I can remember. I always perceived the house I grew up in as dominated by the arts, but, in retrospect I was surrounded by more mathematicians and engineers than I realized. I started playing classical piano at three and participated in all of the competitions and performances any young musician does.

When I was 15 I left home to study with Eric Larsen at the North Carolina School of the Arts where I was a finalist in international competitions like the Arthur Fraser International Concerto Competition. I stayed with Eric Larsen until my time with Barbara Lister-Sink where we focused on rehabilitating a repetitive stress injury I sustained during my freshman year of college.

After multiple years of physical rehabilitation I decided to make a pragmatic career decision. I had never deeply focused on anything aside from classical music, in fact, I didn't even own a computer at the time. Nevertheless, I began learning software.

The puzzle-y nature of code and the structure were two familiar elements I could rely upon even when the learning curve felt steep. When you become multidisciplinary you see a growing number of parallels in seemingly distinct domains.

Now I'm a senior software engineer at a wonderful company with elite peers and I have a deepening understanding of the academic perspective of software in addition to extensive professional experience. There is a new fold in my learning; a B.S. in Mathematics I'm currently pursuing. These my days look a lot like coding at work and for pleasure, studying math, and relaxing while learning a new Scriabin etude or Rachmaninoff Sonata.

When I was managing my repetitive stress injury, with all my eggs in the piano bucket, there were very few clear and appealing futures. That isn't the case now and all the credit goes to starting from zero, and learning. And then doing it again.