Tad Ward

Tad Ward

Being a front-end developer for a living requires spending large amounts of time in front of computer screen or screens, depending on your setup. Whether you work in an office with others or solo at home you need to cut out any distractions.

Here at Blue Fish, we work in a open space so the obvious way to remove those distractions is through popping in my headphones and turning on some tunes. For me, music is a integral part of my development process. I consider it as important as using tools like Gulp or Craft CMS. Music definitely helps me get into the zone and focus on my work. Sometimes I find the type of music that I choose fuels my progress when coding up a website.

I am someone who enjoys a large variety of music. But when I am coding, a particular style of music really appeals to me most: the genres of Chillstep, Future Garage or Liquid Drum and Bass. All 3 genres are similar in style but with subtle differences that I find make cutting out those distractions easier. Not only does this style of music cut out the noise, it's not distracting with a lot of lyrics.

My go to resource is Youtube. I use Youtube more for music than any other app like Spotify or Pandora. Below are some of my favorite tunes and channels that I listen to while coding.

The song above has such an awesome vibe to it. It does have lyrics, but I personally don't find them to be too distracting.

I discovered this on a channel I recently have enjoyed called 17tumba. I highly suggest it.

Possibly my favorite channel is Pulse8. They post a number of videos from varying Chillstep artists and there is even a live stream.

Check it out here.

Here are a few other Chillstep channels I enjoy:

A recent genre of music that I found really great to code to is labeled Future Garage. It is similar to Chillstep at times but has more of an ambient feel to it. My favorite channel for variety and artist mixes is named Mixer. It has a number of awesome, roughly 30 minute long, mixes.

A personal favorite is linked below. Note this starts at 16:25 minutes; starting on another song by the same artist in the video I linked to earlier.

These are just a few samples of the music I like to turn on and tune out my co-workers with, lol.

Hit me up on Twitter, @tadward, with any of your thoughts or suggestions.