· 8 min read · Published on Carlos Builds

The Clave Is Silent on the One

I built a salsa trainer because “just find the 1” is advice from people who can already hear it.

Two phone screenshots from SalsaCoach: a drill that says it saved, and a profile a minute later showing nothing was saved.

What it’s about

In a 2-3 clave, the pattern the band lines up to, none of the five strokes lands on the 1. That’s the beat every salsa teacher tells you to find. I built SalsaCoach around that problem.

This is the story of the first night it ran on a real phone, at 1:43 in the morning. Two of the three bugs I was sure it had didn’t exist; the emulator I’d been measuring with was broken. Two bugs I wasn’t looking for did exist, including a “saved” message that was really the failure branch.

Read the full piece on Carlos Builds

More writing