Hardware is fun (when you get it working), and intelectually challenging. I'm even younger than the "FPGA guy" - I guess I fall in the mentioned Arduino camp (a

Hardware is fun (when you get it working), and intelectually challenging. I'm even younger than the "FPGA guy" - I guess I fall in the mentioned Arduino camp (although I have long moved on to bare microcontrollers). I'd wager that it's quite easy to get into hardware- there are tons of material on building easy and fun projects in no time. By combining practical exercises with "The art of electronics" or freely available "Lessons in electric circuits", one can gain enough knowledge to experiment on it's own in relatively short time.