Rust Audio Programming with Ian Hobson | WolfTalk #016

Interview with Ian Hobson: ex-Ableton freelancer in audio programming using Rust!

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Introduction

For this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Ian Hobson: a former DJ who transitioned to audio programming, worked at Ableton, and then launched a successful freelancing career.

Ian is well-known in the community for his talks on Rust at the Audio Developer Conferences and on YouTube. He’s also created his own programming language: Koto.

We met at the Audio Developer Conference 2022 and he was kind enough to agree on recording an interview with him. I must say that after recording the podcast, I respect his drive to continuously learn and improve even more!

Ian shares a ton of useful knowledge on

freelancing,
Rust for audio programming,
learning Rust,
self-organization,
learning DSP,
maintaining the internal drive in the professional career,
and more!

I highly encourage you to listen to the podcast in full!

Note: If you like the podcast so far, please, go to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review there. You can do so on Spotify as well. It will benefit both sides: more reviews mean a broader reach on Apple Podcasts and feedback can help me to improve the show and provide better quality content to you. You can also subscribe and give a like on YouTube. Thank you for doing this 🙏

Episode Contents

In this podcast episode, you will learn:

how Ian got into DJ-ing and how he then went back to the univerisity to become an audio programmer
how he landed his job at Ableton
why he started exploring Rust for audio
why is Rust more programmer-friendly than C++
how to become a freelancer in the audio programming space
how to stay organized as a freelancer
what is Ian’s go-to tech stack at the moment.

The episode was recorded on November 3, 2023.