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Hello Young Composers, I want to take this time to discuss a new development I have been working on, which is a standalone music notation program for Windows. The program will integrate with this website which will include comments and music management/uploads. I haven't made any official announcements because I wanted to make sure I was actually able to follow through. The first version of this program will be for Windows, and I am happy to say that none of this will be outsourced. Because it will not be outsourced, fixing issues or adding new features will be much easier to accomplish. I plan on making all files saved by this program exportable to Lilypond, which will be worked on after the main phase has been complete. Thus, the vision is after a score has been saved it will be integrated with Lilypond and export a PDF. This will mean that the program could be used exclusively to create Lilypond files. The features of this program will contain everything you would expect in a typical music notation editor. However once the basic framework of the program has been complete, we can be creative and add features that may not exist on competing products.

Bah, people waste time with things they aren't competitive with all the time. Having been on both the hiring, and the being hired, side of the equation, I can tell you, it's often just about showing up and being pleasant to work with. No one person I've ever worked with was ever perfect at all aspects of their job. We are all good enough. When the printer jams, we all try taking it apart and pushing random buttons together, and suddenly it miraculously works again, and we have no idea why. We don't live at risk of being eaten by tigers any more and the world isn't as dog-eat-dog as you seem to think. (If it is that high-pressure where you are, go somewhere else and find some new friends! Because it's not like that for most of us.) It is entirely possible to be merely adequate at your job, whatever it may be, and do just fine. You will not starve on the street or be ridiculed by your peers. The modern problem seems to be one of too much choice. All of us have so many possible paths open to us that will allow us to feed ourselves that it becomes difficult to decide on one. Because we exist in such a fortunate era of history where we do have choices, we are encouraged to find our "passion." There's some intense psychological pressure involved in that. You aren't allowed to just enjoy the people you work with and do a decent job any more. You have to be passionate! But the world needs plumbers, and car washers, and accountants, and internal database managers, and not every moment of those people's days is going to be passionate. It's all gotten a little out of hand. Bottom line, find something you can do and do it. If you want to be a composer, be a composer. If you want to be a plumber by day, and compose by night so that you don't have to worry about the bills, do that. It's your life. Do what you like. Do what you need to. Do a decent job. But don't expect a lightening bolt out of the blue to suddenly illuminate what you are "supposed" to do with your life and don't get preachy about what other people choose to do with theirs. Thousands of generations of hunter gatherers and farmers had no choice in how they spent their days, and they were happy enough.