I'm not sure. I think I might be happier in journalism, or doing industrial controls. Most likely I would learn to code, but I think I would do it a lot differ

I'm not sure. I think I might be happier in journalism, or doing industrial controls. Most likely I would learn to code, but I think I would do it a lot differently. I'm not sure if I would necessarily do it better, because I learned a lot doing tons of crappy useless stuff, but... I don't think I'd have much passion for some of those projects if I knew ahead of time how I'd wind up tossing them entirely. I think, if someone were to ask me to teach them to code today, I would start with Git. I might even say "If you don't like git you probably won't like real industry work much". Not advanced level git, I'd probably just show them git-cola and do everything in the GUI like I mostly do, but I wouldn't want to be writing 200 line programs without VCS, like I was when I first started. I would not mess with odd tools like VB.net(I used that a lot as a kid), livecode, etc. I would have a really strong focus on using modern tools. I would learn Python on VS code, with the debugger, all the type hints, virtual environments for everything, etc. I'd want to learn earlier how all the parts fit together, how to do things in such a way that there's a linter watching out and VSCode autocomplete saving me time. I'd want to learn about Not Reinventing the Wheel, and researching. I'd want to get in a mindset of "Oh, I need to do this, lets stop and look for what's out there" not "I'm just gonna keep click clacking away and parse this with a regex rather than stop coding and learn about some parser library" I'd probably do more intentionally useless projects. If I knew the stuff I was working on was going to be useless, might as well do something fun! And more highly likely to be useful projects. Get started with FOSS contributions early, spend more time fixing other people's crap code instead of doing my own crap code. Then I'd probably show them Arduino on ESP32, since presumably they want to learn basic embedded, if they're asking me this stuff. But I would not accumulate a big parts bin of junk. Eventually, you'll want to make a PCB and do a design with a bare MCU, if you want to really learn... but it's so much more tedious and frustrating and there's so much than just using a module. Which is usually what I do for anything but high volume work (Not something I usually do). I like to say "The parts bin can be the enemy", it costs money, it's unneeded clutter, if you are a fan of the "Digital mindset" you don't need piles of op amps and banana jacks and logic gates and a bench supply and signal generator, until you're doing pretty advanced stuff. You need a nice tidy work area and an ESP32, some female 0.1 jumpers, and some Amazon modules.