The act of unboxing a prototype PCB for the first time, soldering all the components up by hand at the hot air station and then switching it on for the first ti

The act of unboxing a prototype PCB for the first time, soldering all the components up by hand at the hot air station and then switching it on for the first time (and cringing in anticipation of magic smoke or expensive bangs) is one of my favorite things, speaking as a software engineer who dabbles with hardware design in smaller projects for work. It encourages really deep thought and full exploration of your design before "compilation" (spinning a PCB), something that I don't get as much with the quick turnaround run-error-fix-run cycle of the interpreted languages I develop in day to day. It reminds me more of my really early days playing with Gentoo on a Pentium II with 128MB of RAM, where running make had a real cost on a large project. It really encouraged you to think changes through instead of just slapping some changes in and running it to see if they were correct or not.