Make Something With Your Hands (Even if It’s Hideous)

About ~$1200 in materials and many bruised and scraped weekends later... I have something workable. For sure, if I had to do it again, I would do a better job, but it was very satisfying to have not just accomplished it, and have it look kind of OK and rustic, but also it survived the winter ice floes without issue. (Reason: The structure weighs ~7 tons)

  I could never make something as perfect as
  an iPhone, but Apple could never  
  make anything something as shitty 
  as what I do.

    -- Tom Sachs

https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...

>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others

Years later, when the shop teacher passed away, it was announced on facebook and many people showed up in the comments to say they still had their nightlights, and that they still worked 40 years later. I had lost mine years before but somebody sent me a photo and I was able to deduce the components and build a new one. The longevity is due to the simplicity and reliability of the components as well as the toughness of resin.

Think about that- 40 years later, a bunch of kids who didn't have any deep investment in electronics or shop still had items they had built decades before, that still worked. It gave us a sense of satisfaction and a confidence in our abilities.

Many of the most successful folks in the early telecom and scientific instrumentation industry got deep experience doing hand-building of vacuum tubes (typically working at Westinghouse/AT&T in NYC, which was the center of development for that technology, see "The Idea Factory). For example, the inventor of the modern pH meter was a scientist named Beckman who realized he could use the tubes as amplifiers for the tiny signal generated by the hydrogen electrode of the meter, he learned his craft building vacuum tubes by hand.

Although I went into computational research and rarely used my hands (except to assemble PCs), in the past few years I've gotten deeply into "making"- including hand workworking (a chisel and a plane are remarkably effective) and gained a lot of enjoyment from the tactile process of building. I often run my hands over wood using my senses to identify high and low points and tiny scratches (the human hand can detect differences as low as 1 micron) and then correct those through scraping and sanding/grinding. In many ways it can be more satisfying as writing a nice code.

* https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1717/1717-h/1717-h.htm#link2...

* https://www.chesterton.org/a-thing-worth-doing/

* Don’t begin with a ship in a bottle.

* Have a ‘learner’s mind.’

* Aim for meaningful rather than perfect

The cool thing with programming is that you can more easily experiment and evolve.

For me, the biggest draw of programming is the ability to create in a way that is largely only limited by my imagination, time, and knowledge.

Sure, I might take three months to make something I could have bought for $1000, but price is not the point. The thing I made is a unique reflection of my own self, and the experience of making it has value that no money could ever buy.

Cooking, sewing, home renovations, hardware... not just the hands its anything in the physical world that changes the texture of what your doing.

Getting a led to blink on a new platform (the hello world of electronics) is much more satisfying than "hello world" from a program.

And when something works... well it very much touches the inner child who wants to scream "Its alive" like a mad scientist.

But it just stops the moment you get started and make it to the beginner stage. The moment you get one project done, the details around how certain things work is nothing to be found on youtube, unless it’s a very generic skill like cooking.

After that valley of amateur, learning by doing is the best teacher.