for every few years of audio projects I’ve worked on since I started programming in 2019 I’ve gotten to a point where I realized I could have started a layer higher first I was making hardware things with arduino and microcontrollers, then eventually I saw an interview with noise engineering talking about how they prototype everything on a computer first before running on hardware and went huh. that makes more sense than how I’m doing it I’ll do that next time now having invested into doing desktop prototypes for some time, with tons of trial and error and learning to write dsp algorithms by hand, I realize I probably could have worked out all the kinks with the design in something like puredata before going to the effort of implementing it in code just to see if the idea is any good (which I think I will be doing next time) it’s still worth naively going at things the hard way because you learn a ton of shit though. I’m lightyears away in terms of knowledge from where I started, just with the tradeoff of comparatively little I have show off for it