Learning Computer Science Via Building Analog Synthesizers at CodeMash 2026

Being as you are a devoted reader of my blog, I presume that you already know a thing or two about computer science? But what if you didn’t know anything about computer science? What if you decided to learn about it by building analog synthesizers?

That’s the premise of my upcoming talk at CodeMash.

This presentation is an alternate history of your own journey learning computer science. If you started learning all over again, and instead of reading books on C# development or watching videos about Vue.js, you decided to become a developer by building hardware analog synthesizers instead, what would the programming world look like to you? Imagine that the first computer you used was analog instead of digital, that you learned about abstraction from op amps instead of base classes, and you had to solve problems with an oscilloscope instead of a debugger. You might be very good at understanding computational abstractions! Building an analog synthesizer from electronic components is a fun way to learn about electrical engineering, but it also holds many lessons about computer science. In this delightfully strange talk, we will build several computational models from the transistors up, learn how to debug from first principles, understand dynamic typing in terms of modular synthesis, and also have a bunch of beeps, blorps, and solder.

My goal is to have the strangest presentation at CodeMash. We will see if I succeed. If I don’t, I hope I’m in the audience for the even weirder one.