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In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff. T

by valand 5y ago

In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff. Those things are exciting to me. But I notice my work colleagues, especially the ones from newer generations and those working more on high level stuffs, are rarely interested in these computational/communication device hobby thingies at the fundamental levels. They are more interested in what to make out of them rather than what are they made of.

SiVal 5y ago
I always found myself feeling like a fake... No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled. These things are exciting to me And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them. I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!
- Folcon 5y ago
  Ok wow, I feel like this really describes me, I'm playing Kerbal Space Program Multiplayer and one of my friends has completed the game so knows how to do everything and I'm still trying to do each bit that's already been done. It's very much, "look I get that we've done it, but I want to know how to do it", how else am I going to learn? I never really got into ham, I should see if there's anything locally...

by valand 5y ago

SiVal 5y ago

I always found myself feeling like a fake... No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled. These things are exciting to me And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them. I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!

Folcon 5y ago
Ok wow, I feel like this really describes me, I'm playing Kerbal Space Program Multiplayer and one of my friends has completed the game so knows how to do everything and I'm still trying to do each bit that's already been done. It's very much, "look I get that we've done it, but I want to know how to do it", how else am I going to learn? I never really got into ham, I should see if there's anything locally...