Goodbye code, hello strings! Jonathan Coulton did it!

I think life can give you some signals about what to do at any moment, but their timing can make them pretty amusing. Just when I started writing a blog about life rebooting (this one), one of those signals came in the form of Lifehacker’s interview to Jonathan Coulton. I didn’t know who he was until that very day, and now it’s impossible for me to think of a very successful clean installer without him coming to my mind.

For all of you who never heard of Coulton before, he’s a Visual Basic programmer who left his IT profession behind to become a full time, profitable musician. And, as simple as this fact could sound to some people, think for a second about it. We’re talking about a guy who, in classical, conservative terms, did the unthinkable: trade his very safe 9 to 5 job for guitar playing and singing!

His story about how he accomplished this is surely inspiring. You can read all of it on his website, but what make all of this even greater are the absolutely cool achievements he got since he took that decision. He has consistent sales of his music through Amazon, iTunes and his own page, performed at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, has become a geek icon, got a pair of songs as downloadable content in Rock Band 2, and has as an article about himself on Wikipedia. If that isn’t an example of how good a clean install can get, I don’t know what could be.

And the music is pretty cool, also.

Jonathan Coulton's homepage
His Lifehacker interview