Subj : Re: Hi all!
To   : Digital Man
From : scarface
Date : Mon Sep 01 2025 11:14 am

 DM> hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they
 DM> "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC
 DM> components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've
 DM> learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away
 DM> from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building

haha, this is uh, how I "built" computers. I also learnt about networking stuff from helping dad set up a home network, and about various OS's. I think the latter helped me more with a career. That said, my first day on a professional job (as a web dev) was assembling my own machine and installing OS. That company aged out that practice eventually.

Recently though (5 years or less maybe) I went through Ben Eater's 8 bit computer series. I'd learnt the "basics" I guess at uni, but never really applied them in such a way that I understood the foundations. During his videos I got curious on how the actual logic chips he used could be built with transistors. Got a bag of transistors of various types to try build each gate and latch. Fun! I then got interested in how transistors worked, and kinda understood it but decided that was as low as I wanted to go haha.

I think it is a great skill to tinker around with stuff you don't know, just to find out how to know about it. I do programming videos of my hobby projects and some comments I get is that people love seeing the whole experience, the failures, as well as the successes. It helps show that even deep technical work can be started from a state of not knowing much, but applying different knowledges from other areas in different ways you can start to learn a lot more. sure you muck it up sometimes but ya know what I like about computers/electronics, you can usually fix it even if you muck it up (noting this may not be the case for shorts/fires/explosions/network mishaps, but you can do some basic stuff to prevent those risks).

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