I recently recorded an interview with my father, who last year retired from his 50-year career as an electronics engineer. He told me that the main reason he b

I recently recorded an interview with my father, who last year retired from his 50-year career as an electronics engineer. He told me that the main reason he became interested in electronics as a kid in the 50s/60s was so he could build short wave crystal radios, to listen to radio content from around the world, particularly cricket and BBC programs. He grew up in a country town (now outer suburb) near Melbourne, Australia, so was a bit isolated and yearning to feel connected to the world. That led to a decade working for Australia's major telco (now Telstra, then PMG/Telecom) researching and building wireless networks, then 40 years running his own company that produced all kinds of different products using microprocessors for monitoring and control/automation. I realised that this very much mirrored my own pathway into my career: I immediately dived into the web as soon as it was available in the mid 90s as a way of finding content and communities I was interested in, and for the thrill of being connected to the world, which then led to learning web development and software development and pursuing a career that's now been going for 25 years, doing all kinds of different things, but all of it on the web/internet (and to bring it full circle, for the past few years I worked with my father to make his devices internet-enabled and turn them into IoT products).