Love this question! Most surprising in terms of unexpected returns: learning to build my own PC (Pentium 120MHz) at age 14 or 15 with parts from a local comput

Love this question! Most surprising in terms of unexpected returns: learning to build my own PC (Pentium 120MHz) at age 14 or 15 with parts from a local computer fair. Searching and selecting the components and assembling everything by hand gave me a very personal connection to the machine and turned a complex thing in to something I felt I understood from first principles and could master and not be afraid of. I've always hand assembled my main PC ever since and I credit this ritual with all sorts of stuff: - Getting me confident early on to experiment and play around with the machine knowing I could fix almost anything - Keeping semi current with hardware over the years and getting an early view at the future (shift to almost limitless RAM, shift to multi-core, shift to SSD) - and the implications for the software I write. - Understanding subtle hardware trade offs and constraints. This has helped countless times when I'm speccing out servers or infrastructure for the code I write (helps too when picking laptops !) - Making it obvious, fun and easy to indulge in things like Raspis, OpenWRT etc. - Providing endless jumping off points to burnish my understanding of the universe that makes up computing (different architectures, graphics subsystems, disk controllers, network fabrics etc) - Getting me interested in the hardware and software history of computing and what it looked like 20,30,40,50 years ago. This has helped me hugely in understanding why things today are the way they are (programming languages, operating systems, software abstractions etc) That's just off the top of my head :)