A few weeks ago I started playing with some AVR (arduino) chips and a box of electronics parts, and it's been way more fun than I thought it would be. There's

A few weeks ago I started playing with some AVR (arduino) chips and a box of electronics parts, and it's been way more fun than I thought it would be. There's a certain satisfaction of actually building something tangible that is missing in my professional high-level coding, for example flipping a bit in a register and watching an led turn on or a motor start turning. It's also fun to see what I can get out of 8KB of storage and 512 bytes of RAM, something I'm not used to with the 96GB servers I normally write code for. I've also learned a ton about digital and analog electronics. If you have any programming experience (which on this site you more than likely do), you can get up and running with an Arduino starter kit in like 10 minutes. It has a very active community and there's tons of articles covering all the basics.