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This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I c
by pliftkl 6y ago
This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago> passive income Just curious: is this income 100% passive?
- brtkdotse 6y agoThere’s no such thing, there’s just varying degrees of risk vs leverage.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoOf course there is, within a defined timeframe. If I bought 5-year government bond last year, then this year it's 100% passive income to me. I don't have to do absolutely anything in order to get it this year.
- busterarm 6y agoAdd me to the list of software developers who desires to switch to woodworking/machining.
- secondcoming 6y agoI too would love to do it. It irks me to this day that I was taught nonsense such as latin in school instead of woodwork or metalwork.
- mercurysmessage 6y agoIn my High School I didn't learn Latin, but I did learn some wood and metal working, and also a little bit about engines.
- busterarm 6y agoAt the end of the day, we're people who build stuff and problem-solving/analytical skills are transferable. The draw to these seemingly not-so-adjacent fields is strong.
- bilbo0s 6y agoSerious question, didn't anyone else' school have shop class? I was a college prep, NHS, cross country, all AP core courses kind of guy, and I took it all four years of high school. Or was there some kind of restriction on taking it at your school? Or maybe your parents didn't let you? Genuinely curious as to why someone with a professed interest would not have taken shop?
- maxerickson 6y agoAt my high school shop was at the same time as band and other music classes, so you couldn't do both. Lots of schools don't have the classes though, probably mostly because of funding.
- jacquesm 6y agoAnd insurance.
- nicbou 6y agoThere was a special program at my school that gave you more shop classes. They did everything to discourage me from joining it, because it's where they shoved the struggling kids. I really enjoyed it, and really can't see why it was just for struggling kids. This was the last year before the school reform. They ended that program. In fact they ended shop class altogether.
- busterarm 6y agoHigh school was 20 years ago for me and no shop classes.
- bilbo0s 6y agoIt was over 20 years ago for me, and we had shop classes. It's amazing how heterogeneous the US school system has been, and continues to be apparently.
- secondcoming 6y agoIt was only offered in certain types of secondary school. Mine was considered 'posh' and so we wore blazers and learned latin, whereas other schools didn't have blazers and offered 'trade' subjects.
- OJFord 6y ago'Design & Technology' (woodworking, little metal, textiles, food, etc.) is on the curriculum in the UK, so I did that. Had to take one variant at GCSE, I did electronics. (Having waited practically my entire school life to have a lesson that was electronics and only electronics!) But it irks me to this day that the language I opted for, Latin, was dropped that annus, because not enough others signed up. You can't please everyone. (I did like wood/metal work though, just not as much by far as electronics. I'd be much more interested now though - I watch an awful lot of it on YouTube.)
- ccozan 6y agoTo be completly honest, we had a lot of classes of metalworking, woodworking, textiles, etc in our school before the '89 Revolution in Romania. I really enjoyed it and it made me love working with materials and building physical things. Still writing software...But renovating my house was a nice way to remember all that lost skills.
- non-entity 6y agoI wish I had taken anything but latin in HS. Only reason I did it was because of colleges requiring foreign language classes, and by the time I had graduated, I didn't have any plans of going to college.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoLess machine learning, more learning machining?
- nicbou 6y agoLess training models, more model trains
- amelius 6y agoHow about robotics? It would allow you to combine mechanical engineering with CS.
- franky47 6y agoAdd me too. Somehow the joy of seeing things being built from raw materials in the real world equates that of complex software being created out of nothing. But the finite element of the real world has that extra satisfying element: no dependencies to update, (mostly) no security patches, generally less maintenance, and it lasts longer.
- decasteve 6y agoTimber framing here. That's woodworking.
- ArcMex 6y agoFunny, I want to move to a farm and keep goats and chickens (I am a Systems Architect). I still want to code in my spare time, if only to just pass on the skills to my offspring.
- mikro2nd 6y agoDid this 25 years ago. Never looked back. eta: Admittedly I did a bunch of design/architecture consulting and teaching tech courses for the first decade or so to pay for the farm. Consulting is a good way to keep your hand in, and teaching serves as a great marketing platform for the consulting work.
- inglor_cz 6y agoThe great thing about chickens is that they debug your farm for you :-)
- amoitnga 6y ago:) the downside is you have to 'install' and continuously 'run' a shovel
- driverdan 6y agoHave you ever worked on a farm? If not make sure you understand exactly what it entails. Most people who've never done it vastly underestimate how much work it is. That said, a small hobby farm with goats and chickens doesn't take much work. But going on vacation can be problematic.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoYou might find that what was a hobby is not as much fun as a job. I mentioned this to an actual "rock star" developer London session musician with a doctorate in music who moved to development after teaching themselves after an accident.
- StavrosK 6y agoI have a job writing software, and in my spare time I write software as a hobby. The job is much less enjoyable than the hobby, because in the hobby I'm doing, by definition, only things I like. I think any hobby is less enjoyable when you have it as a job, since you sometimes need to do things you don't like doing or aren't interested in.
- chongli 6y agoThere are lots of people who generate income from some type of cottage industry hobby. Woodworking, candles, jewellery, preserves, decorations. If you’ve got a bunch of equity to fall back on (in the form of your home plus securities), then you’re in a much better position to escape the pressure to do unwanted work. The above is one of the major reasons I’m such a fan of basic income. I think we’d see a lot more cottage industry shops, used bookstores, cafés, and the like, if we all had basic income to cover our basic needs. Heck, even software developers can get in on the game by working on their own passion projects. Whether it’s indie gaming or retro computing, a new photo editor or CAD software, or perhaps a new sort of application never before seen. There’s just so much cool stuff people can do with computers when they aren’t trying to build a startup aimed at a big exit.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoFor me its always a sign of that they have precarious finances or are posh enough to leverage that into high end clients.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoI won't move away from my main job for a while, but I do want to move to a lifestyle where I grow all my own food. It's a very interesting problem, of whether a single person/family can be mostly self-sufficient on food while spending only a small part of their day growing the said food. Lots of biology, perhaps a little bit of tech thrown in, if it helps.
- fullstop 6y agoI thought about this as well. I think that I'd be mostly okay on the vegetable front but I don't think that I'm up to plucking chickens or raising animals. I would also need a bigger yard!
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoI am pretty okay with it. I eat meat. I have done the dirty work in the past, and I am willing to do it again.
- fullstop 6y agoI'm pretty sure that the animals would become my friends.
- OJFord 6y agoI think you easily can, the difficulty comes with whether you can be happy with what you're limited to, so more a question of personal tolerance for lack of variety in order to be happy with your food, IMO.
- peterwwillis 6y agoDamnit, that was my plan too, only I have no passive income, so customers (or contracting) would be important. Hopefully this trend doesn't continue to become a glut of Silicon Valley woodworkers...
- mauvehaus 6y agoAs a warning, you're eventually going to run out of places to put that furniture if you don't sell some of it! I'm the OP on that github issue, and while my partner and still have some IKEA furniture I'd like to replace, we also have a couple of pieces of mine that don't fit readily into our lives that we just have around the house. The chandelier on my website[0] was a spec piece built for a show at the Wharton Esherick Museum[1]. It didn't sell at the show, and I don't really have a place for it. It's now sitting in a crate in a corner of our bedroom. Likewise, the Federal period shelf clock[2] is without a shelf and is also sitting in a crate until I get a chance to mount a shelf for it. How hard can it be, you ask? Surprisingly difficult in a log cabin. If the pandemic ever ends and I get my workbench out of our living room, I might have a place for it! [0] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/chandelier/ https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/chandelier/ [1] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org https://whartonesherickmuseum.org [2] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/federalclock/ https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/federalclock/
- Jenz 6y agoThe software developer turned woodworker keeps reading HN? :P
- mauvehaus 6y agoYeah, it pretty reliably turns up interesting articles from the long tail (are the cool kids even still using that phrase?).
- fendy3002 6y agoYou can checkout anytime you like but you can never leave
- dimitrios1 6y agoYou really missed what that songs about.