My Story of Something From Nothing

My Story of Something From Nothing - By Rafi Barides

I keep coming back to the same idea, even when the work looks different on the surface. Something from nothing. That pattern has shaped everything I’ve built.

At some point, I applied to over a hundred jobs. The feedback was consistent: “lack of focus.” Music. Coding. Video. Design. Drawing.

So let’s rewind and actually look at how this unfolded.

Some of the highest-pressure work I’ve done has been in music video production. I’ve produced and directed music videos for artists like Mordechai Shapiro, including Ashira, which was one of the most complex shoots I’ve ever led. Multiple locations. Live band. Dancers. Extras. A large crew. Every moving part dependent on another. When things go wrong on a shoot like that, there’s no abstraction. You’re responsible for people’s time, energy, and trust in real time. I had to deliver a finished product, period. That video has over 2 million views.

To make those video productions possible, I hired and collaborated with Vive Khamsingsavath to cast dancers and coordinate international shoots. Video projects took me to several countries including Peru, Colombia, and the UAE. They were tightly scoped productions with real budgets and consequences.

Alongside directing, I fell deep into color grading.

I’m not publicly known as a colorist, but I’ve graded a large volume of work across YouTube series, music videos, and commercial content using DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Creative Cloud. In the orthodox space, I have done colorist work for Beri Weber, Benny Friedman, Mordechai Shapiro, Moishe Tischler, and Lipa Schmeltzer. I’ve also created and released LUTs, some sold, some shared freely, including one used by photographer Dani Diamond.

That visual language work trained my eye for systems: consistency, mood, continuity, and how small adjustments compound into a finished experience. Which brings me to music.

Music was never just performance for me.

Early on, I performed keyboards at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and sold custom Korg PA4X sound kits to other musicians. I wrote musical arrangements for live performances and worked directly with performers to shape full sets.

Later, that desire to create evolved into software.

I built and sold VST plugins, including reverbs and saturation tools, written in C++ using JUCE and Projucer. I didn’t just code the DSP. I designed the interfaces, created the artwork, built the commerce sites, and distributed them to producers who actively use them. That work sits at the intersection of math, sound, usability, and aesthetics.

In 2022, I wrote the lyrics for “Stand Up For You” for Project Ezra, performed by Danny Palgon, and collaborated with artists like Freskim Rama (Kimi), an American Idol contestant, on production and vocal performance.

That same instinct showed up when I was working on my own personal music.

There are over 2.5 million samples available on platforms like Splice. And yet, I couldn’t find the inspiration I was looking for.

After producing hundreds of tracks for clients and collaborating with dozens of musicians worldwide, I started sending them short musical ideas and saying: “Play this for me.” Those recordings were originally just for my own use. Then I had hundreds of sounds. More than I could ever realistically use. So I released them.

I wrote, performed, and hired musicians to build sample packs sold through my own commerce site. Hundreds of copies of my disco-funk toolkit have been sold. I filmed the promos, ran the Facebook ads, and later partnered with LANDR, where those sounds are now used by thousands of producers across the industry.

They’re raw. Close to the source. Performed by real musicians on high-end gear. No filler.

Aside from samples, I wanted to build products.

I built multiple applications, three of which are currently live on iOS: Shabbatzman, Worldly, and Arbiem. Arbiem is a streaming platform, where I worked directly with local artists to build a catalog, infrastructure, and listening experience from the ground up.

That work required engineering, design, product thinking, and trust-building with creators. There was no template. You build, test, break, and iterate until something real exists. Photography fits into this same pattern.

I shoot on a Sony A7III. My stock photography is licensed through iStock and Getty Images. I’ve done food photography for restaurant menus, including Sushi Tokyo, fashion and makeup shoots for local artists, and album artwork, including the cover for Mordechai Shapiro’s Achas. I draw too. Mostly for myself. Some of that physical work lives in my portfolio, or to draw custom characters within game development.

But I am not here to be braggadocious. So what does software engineering have to do with photography, music, video editing, drawing, or graphic design?

It’s the same act every time.

You take an empty space and make something coherent. You think in systems. You solve problems creatively and technically. You ship.

There’s a well-documented idea that generalists who think across disciplines outperform specialists in uncertain and complex environments. And the world we’re building in is exactly that.

Doing multiple things doesn’t mean less commitment. It doesn’t mean less rigor. It means literacy across tools and mediums.

So maybe the issue isn’t focus.

Maybe it’s that the work doesn’t fit neatly into a single box.

In his book Range, David Epstein argues that people who develop breadth across disciplines often outperform narrow specialists in complex, unpredictable environments. He shows how early specialization works in stable systems with clear rules, but breaks down when problems require pattern recognition, transfer of knowledge, and creative synthesis. Generalists build mental models that travel. They connect ideas across domains, adapt faster when constraints change, and solve problems that don’t have predefined paths. In a world where tools, platforms, and industries constantly shift, range isn’t a liability. It’s leverage. The book had a profound impact on me, and my self worth.

None of this feels scattered to me. Music, software, video, photography, drawing, and design all come from the same place: the instinct to build something that didn’t exist and make it work end to end. The mediums change, but the thinking doesn’t. The work has always been about turning ambiguity into structure and ideas into finished systems. If that doesn’t read as focus, that’s fine. The output still ships.