Ask HN: What seeds you sowed years ago that you are reaping fruits of now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What seeds you sowed years ago that you are reaping fruits of now?

This could be technical, social, financial or anything -- what was the seed and what fruits are you reaping now?

I took the first nice car I bought three years after I got my first job to the dealer to replace brakes. They charged me $550 for it. After that I taught myself how to fix things, starting with cars, plumbing, drywall, electrical and each and every thing in my daily use. I haven't paid for any repairs or upgrades to my house or my cars in over 10 years. I invested in tools and educating myself rather than pay someone else.

I can now fix anything and everything that I use daily.

I did the complete opposite.

I paid a company to buy furniture from IKEA that I selected, deliver it, assemble it and get rid of all the cardboards and waste. I just sat there for three hours and everything was done. Best money I spent.

I also did the same while moving to a new home. I paid the mover to do everything, dismantle beds and furniture, pack everything, then assemble everything in the new property. I didn't feel the pain of moving at all.

I get that sometimes saving money and learning something new like fixing cars is a good thing. But as a 45 years old, spending money to get peace of mind and reduce stress has become the priority for me now.

I follow this as well. It's not simply peace of mind. I have books to read, videos to watch, code to write, newbies to mentor, and kids to play with. There are two days in a weekend and the worst thing I can do is something I don't enjoy, which won't improve my salary in the future.

For me it started because of money, but then it became a hobby. Besides, I can go for an oil change and have everything done for me. However, it's fun researching about different oils, finding a best price online, getting it shipped and then doing the oil change with my young kid. I consider it nice father/son activity. Having my son learn about things is a bonus.

Similarly, when I finished some unfinished part of the basement, I planned it with my kid, went to Menards to buy drywall, picked a color, painted together. He got a sense of accomplishment and so did I.

I can see your point. I’m currently fitting new doors in my house and teaching myself how to do it. It’s a pain in the backside however, but it’s satisfying and I feel a sense of pride every time I open and close the door to go to the bathroom. I did that!

Yep. I am writing code professionally for long time, so that pride and sense of accomplishment is hard to come by. But fixing anything, even small, gives me that satisfaction every time I use it.

In 2014, after retiring from full-time work in the SF Bay Area, I decided to use my savings to purchase some undeveloped land in southern Rhode Island and build a custom home there. The results have exceeded all my expectations and I'm very grateful.

https://www.corememorymusic.com/this-new-house.html

Very nice! Would you mind sharing ballpark figures on how much a project like this costs?

About the same as a 2br townhouse in Mountain View. Feel free to email me (see my profile) if you'd like more information on costs.

Answering in the present as a mid-20s person who is currently sowing the seeds of financial independence by saving/investing over half of my after-tax income. Having compound interest working in my favor early is key to my FIRE goals.

Want to set myself up to have the freedom to demand certain things at work, whether that’s taking a sabbatical or working only 4 days a week without being chained to my work for a living. And eventually I’d like to consider early retirement.

A solid understanding of math. Not so much the specifics of certain subjects, but the way of thinking.

Agreed. Numeracy is a life-long skill whose applications pervade every aspect of one's life. Making decisions and navigating the world become much simpler tasks when estimation, analysis and forecasting are familiar tools at one's disposal.

I inherited some code written by a junior. It was messy, with lots of code (and bugs) copy pasted everywhere and gigantic god methods which took up 4/5 of the file. It would take 4 hours to copy a thing like loading a paaginated endpoint, because of the heavily coupled nature.

I realized it would only take about 8 hours to refactor some of those parts to 30 minutes, and about a week to refactor that 30 minutes of work to 5 minutes. The pages now not only load better, they're free from copy-paste bugs, and easy to add new modules. At peak refactoring, I was removing thousands of lines of code a week, with some good teamwork from QA to keep it clean.

A year later, and I'm now able to integrate new features in half a day compared to about a week, leaving me about 20 hours/week free to do whatever, which I'm using to upgrade the whole codebase to reactive and native code, as well as learning iOS programming. It is very nice to go from a week behind schedule to several days ahead of schedule.

My plan for next year is to keep cutting down the cost for new features. Everything that takes me 20 hours to do today should take me 2-3 hours in the future.

Well done. That’s the perfect attitude to writing and maintaining code.

I had an idea for an app and I taught myself how to code so I could make the app. I poured thousands of hours into learning. For a while it was like having two full time jobs. At a certain point I knew it was what I wanted to do for work. It was hard to get my first job, but I was lucky and got it. The rest is history.

I never got around to building the app, but I did build a career.

I taught myself how to pick locks when I was a kid and I've saved the day on numerous occasions in my adult life where people were locked out at inopportune moments and I was able to get us in.

Haha, I've tried to teach myself a few times, but only when I was locked out myself. Always ended up just calling a locksmith.

I married the right person 30 years ago. I reaped 30 years of a pretty sweet life. When I faced difficulties, I did so with someone firmly in my corner that I could trust and count on.

Thanksgiving weekend 1984 I spent reading K&R. That's added up to a career that has paid (and still pays) pretty well.

My wife said, "That's not actionable." What I did from her point of view is, I always treated her with compassion. And I listened with empathy, even if I didn't agree. The fruit is how much she trusts me.

I got good at networking on LinkedIn. I realized that it didn't need to be weird, any more than meeting new people at events is weird. Over time, it became just as useful a tool as actually meeting people in person, only I could do it anywhere.

It helps if you've not got the option of discovering new people at events, for example like the way things are now. It's making it hard for people who rely on face-2-face to develop relationships with new prospects.

Separately, I always had this sense that it helps to have a trio: skills, domain expertise, and a professional network. It took a while to build up all three, and it's a process that's never done, but I always sensed to work towards having not just one or two but all three.

How do you network on LinkedIn please? Do you just hit people up and add them? How would one start?

> Do you just hit people up and add them Yes and No. Yes, you reach out to people that are not in your network, and that have never met you. No, it helps if you connect with a message tailored to that person that makes the connection of where your professional interests overlap.

> How would one start? I actually wrote an article about this when everyone went into lockdown:

https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-network-on-linkedin-w...

I forced myself to get into my own bootstrapped SAAS business in 2014 and it is now in a reasonable shape where I can continue to grow it at any pace I want while I enjoy a stability of enough revenue to sustain a decent lifestyle. I m no way to close to being done :) but I can say with comfort that I achieved the bare minimums and have replaced my meaningless corporate life successfully. Has been a tough 6+ years but was worth it for me.

On a personal side, I taught myself how to cut my own hair few years ago and boy it has been amazingly fruitful especially right now. My first 4-5 cuts were nothing short of embarrassments but I am a pro now with the limited way I give myself a buzz cut and scissors in front.

About 20 years past, helped a friend of a friend build a manufacturing process, get accredited, and wrote some templates for his QA, QC, NRTL submittals, etc. Did this mostly gratis. Got many good references, which became the beginning of a side business.

Got my pilot's license and instrument rating through the old military flying club system (while all else were getting drunk on liberty). It has oft been the difference between servicing a happy client or perhaps getting hit with a tort (the latter has yet to happen directly to me, but it has happened to a member of the consortium because he was not able to get to a site before a critical deadline.

White collar crime, decades ago. Unless laws change, it'll follow me for the rest of my life.

Good fruit or bad fruit? As in cash or curse?

Not years ago but recent seeds

I wrote a blog post on filament manufacturing at home.

That blog post got over 25k views, many people contacted me on telegram. While all the information is available for free in my blog post, few people asked me to be their consultant for 10% share of profit.

So I ended up helping them setup their own filament manufacturing unit and now I am recieving 10% of profit. We aren't competiting with each other as we only target one country.

Right now money from review share is not a lot it's few thousands of dollars. But we are combining efforts and helping each other get more sales.

This business is local, for example I found 1 guy from Germany, Italy and United States and one university from India which are now making their own filament. One guy from UK is also working on this but it's still in progress.

Here's the blogpost if anyone is interested:

https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

Spent $10 on node.js course, now earning my living from it.

That's a pretty sad view into the state of hiring.

It's sad that someone with self-taught skills can earn their living?

So sad that someone can take an introductory course and then YEARS later be employed in the industry.

Technically not from seeds, but apples, cherries, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, and asparagus.

Fitness: lost 50lb, which moved me from obese to normal BMI, then put on enough muscle to squat 1.5x my bodyweight for reps. Then got into running just enough to be able to run 3 miles on demand and 10 miles with a little lead time to prep. This all took maybe five years. Now I'm hopefully 18 months out from starting a thru hike of the Appalachian trail. The feeling that I can just trot into a run at any time just feels so good after a lifetime of obesity. Plus now exercise just feels so good, my biggest issue is overuse injuries so I'm constantly mixing up my routine to fight that.

Finances: started saving more than I spend, so I can take off time as needed to do big expedition projects like a 6-9 month thru hike. Also have learned a huge amount about finance and economics, which helps a lot with knowing what to do with saved money.

Location: moved from nowhere TX to the big city. Best decision ever. I was making 29k a year as a programmer there, immediately doubled that when I moved. The more I made, the more I could pay off debt.

Got debt free ASAP: paid off 200k student loan debt by living with my grandmother as her cook, handyman, and cleaner for 3 years. This was awesome, I got to learn a lot from her in those few years she was still pretty coherent.

Food: started writing down everything I eat, this helped me break my emotional attachment to eating that plagues my whole family. Now I'm 5+ years out from losing 50# and still fitting in my new clothes. Also got good enough at cooking that I can feed myself without getting bored, so I only really ever eat out socially, maybe 2-3 times a week.

Drastically reduced drinking alcohol and caffeine: drinking makes me feel bad, costs a lot of money, and caffeine makes me anxious. Today I drink less than a beer a week, and I feel like crap when I do, so I rarely do. It's a bummer too, because I'm a pretty handy bartender and barista after years of food service work.

Engineering: got serious about my programming skills 10 years ago, and worked hard to get much better at it. Finished SICP, Let Over Lambda, a couple of Haskell books, and a million TDD katas. Now I'm extremely fluent in several languages, and can solve most technical challenges encountered in a typical software shop. I'm surely not a PhD in CS, nor am I master leetcoder, but I'm pretty handy with unit tests and a repl in pretty much any environment. This makes my day job so much more rewarding, and I'm able to work a chill job with some fantastic coworkers.

Marriage to the right person: I'll never marry anyone else, but I choose to remarry this woman every single day, 13 years later. She doesn't care about money and isn't materialistic. She isn't addicted to social media. She likes to work hard, then loaf on the sofa with me and play WoW. We're effectively 100% financially compatible. This is so important it's silly. This takes out maybe 99% of potential stress between us. She's effectively already had kids (raised her two much younger sisters, woot they just graduated college!), so we're childless and really happy with that.

Career: learned progamming, made really good money doing it. Taught friends and family how to program, now they've got careers too and are escaping poverty. Feels pretty amazing to help my family really learn how to fish.

Art: picked up violin at age 30, taking lessons every week, I've gotten good enough I can reasonably site read a lot of easy pop pieces. Learned enough painting and drawing to really enjoy figure drawing sessions and portrait painting. Both have helped complement my life considerably.

Materialism: been working on reducing this in myself. I've gone from a medium house filled to the brim with crap down to a small apartment with just a few select high quality items. My day to day emotional enjoyment has increased substantially. It's easier to keep tidy, which helps a lot.

Mental health: I realized that I suffer from anxiety and an in progress with doctors and therapists to sort out how to let go. I'm expecting high dividends from this, so far it's better but not great.

Location: just moved a few miles away, but now I'm surrounded by forest. This is amazing and I love it.

Old car: I just don't care one wit about looking cool or socially signaling with a car. This saves money for actually cool stuff like violin lessons.

What didn't pay off as much as I'd hoped:

Writing a blog then some books: eh it was fine, but didn't even scratch 1% of what I could earn in the open market as a developer. That time better would have been spent focusing on my career.

Baking: contributed to my obesity in my mid twenties, even baking bread is still a hell of a lot of empty carbs

Winter sports: eh they're fine, but really expensive and ultimately something I enjoy just once or twice a year. Also I now have a limp when I sit for too long from a pretty bad snowboarding accident. It goes away when I warm up, but that freaked me out enough to say mostly it's just not worth it for me.

Moving upwards in the tech ladder: became a director of a whole office a few years ago in medium software company. It largely made my life worse for little benefit. I'd previously read the Gervais-Mclod series by michaelochurch and believed it, but wanted to see for myself. Just started the process to step down last month, couldn't be happier. I'd rather be a "loser" than "clueless". Plus engineering is awesome, managing managers and budgets just isn't as appealing to me. As Jack in Stargate says, "I've spent my whole life sticking it to the man. If I do this, I'll be the man. I don't think I can be the man."

Buying a house: this was a wash, netted about the same, and I was pretty careful about it all. Houses have a lot of unexpected costs. I'm glad I did, and glad it's gone.

What I'm hopeful for:

Sailing: I want to get a liveaboard small sailboat. I expect this to be a decent amount of work, but I love sailing and being near the water. Hoping to try this for a year in 2023. Helps that my wife is am A&P mechanic, and she's excited at the prospect of having a project always to work on.

Thru hiking: I plan to attempt the AT in 2022, I'm hoping this becomes a big part of my life. I'm expecting to get into the culture of it, then earn money to live on over winters. I've started several years ago doing more overnight and weekend hikes to get used to it. I'm crushing a 45lb ruck every day to build up tendon/muscular strength, with the goal of building up to a consistent 60lb every day. Already my endurance is really increased, so I'm hoping it's a good way to prepare in advance. Also my gear is pretty locked in at <25lb total, so I'm hoping the heavier rucks translate easily into endurance.

Created a subscription based Chrome extension: https://www.checkbot.io/

It was a lot of work to get out of the door and I nearly went with one-off payments but it's been going well.

Tech stocks, bought them and sat on them.

AMZN 2014

NFLX 2014

TSLA 2014

NVDA 2016

Frankly valuations are getting bubbly now but I'll probably just hold for the next while.

Learnt Python to get started with webdev a decade ago.

It let me put bread on the table all this time.

Nvidia shares. Put all my savings in them. 8x return if I sell now.

What made you do it?

That was when I realized deep learning is here to stay, and Nvidia owns the DL hardware market. At the time, everyone said I was crazy to put all my eggs in one basket.

"Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket." - Andrew Carnegie

Always depends on the quality of the basket and the eggs, of course.

Also survivorship bias. We wouldn't be having this conversation if NVIDIA had a major catastrophe like Wirecard recently had and owner of basket was unable to sell shares quickly enough for some reason.

All eggs in one basket takes some serious bravery.

Even now I'll call you crazy ;)

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