Hacker News Reader

Comment by pliftkl | Hacker News Reader

This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.

View on HN

As a warning, you're eventually going to run out of places to put that furniture if you don't sell some of it!

I'm the OP on that github issue, and while my partner and still have some IKEA furniture I'd like to replace, we also have a couple of pieces of mine that don't fit readily into our lives that we just have around the house. The chandelier on my website[0] was a spec piece built for a show at the Wharton Esherick Museum[1]. It didn't sell at the show, and I don't really have a place for it. It's now sitting in a crate in a corner of our bedroom.

Likewise, the Federal period shelf clock[2] is without a shelf and is also sitting in a crate until I get a chance to mount a shelf for it. How hard can it be, you ask? Surprisingly difficult in a log cabin. If the pandemic ever ends and I get my workbench out of our living room, I might have a place for it!

[0] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/chandelier/

[1] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org

[2] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/federalclock/

The software developer turned woodworker keeps reading HN? :P

Yeah, it pretty reliably turns up interesting articles from the long tail (are the cool kids even still using that phrase?).

You can checkout anytime you like but you can never leave

You really missed what that songs about.

You might find that what was a hobby is not as much fun as a job.

I mentioned this to an actual "rock star" developer London session musician with a doctorate in music who moved to development after teaching themselves after an accident.

I have a job writing software, and in my spare time I write software as a hobby. The job is much less enjoyable than the hobby, because in the hobby I'm doing, by definition, only things I like.

I think any hobby is less enjoyable when you have it as a job, since you sometimes need to do things you don't like doing or aren't interested in.

There are lots of people who generate income from some type of cottage industry hobby. Woodworking, candles, jewellery, preserves, decorations. If you’ve got a bunch of equity to fall back on (in the form of your home plus securities), then you’re in a much better position to escape the pressure to do unwanted work.

The above is one of the major reasons I’m such a fan of basic income. I think we’d see a lot more cottage industry shops, used bookstores, cafés, and the like, if we all had basic income to cover our basic needs.

Heck, even software developers can get in on the game by working on their own passion projects. Whether it’s indie gaming or retro computing, a new photo editor or CAD software, or perhaps a new sort of application never before seen. There’s just so much cool stuff people can do with computers when they aren’t trying to build a startup aimed at a big exit.

For me its always a sign of that they have precarious finances or are posh enough to leverage that into high end clients.

Add me to the list of software developers who desires to switch to woodworking/machining.

I too would love to do it. It irks me to this day that I was taught nonsense such as latin in school instead of woodwork or metalwork.

In my High School I didn't learn Latin, but I did learn some wood and metal working, and also a little bit about engines.

At the end of the day, we're people who build stuff and problem-solving/analytical skills are transferable.

The draw to these seemingly not-so-adjacent fields is strong.

Serious question, didn't anyone else' school have shop class? I was a college prep, NHS, cross country, all AP core courses kind of guy, and I took it all four years of high school.

Or was there some kind of restriction on taking it at your school? Or maybe your parents didn't let you?

Genuinely curious as to why someone with a professed interest would not have taken shop?

At my high school shop was at the same time as band and other music classes, so you couldn't do both.

Lots of schools don't have the classes though, probably mostly because of funding.

And insurance.

There was a special program at my school that gave you more shop classes. They did everything to discourage me from joining it, because it's where they shoved the struggling kids. I really enjoyed it, and really can't see why it was just for struggling kids.

This was the last year before the school reform. They ended that program. In fact they ended shop class altogether.

High school was 20 years ago for me and no shop classes.

It was over 20 years ago for me, and we had shop classes. It's amazing how heterogeneous the US school system has been, and continues to be apparently.

It was only offered in certain types of secondary school. Mine was considered 'posh' and so we wore blazers and learned latin, whereas other schools didn't have blazers and offered 'trade' subjects.

Primary school a little of pottery and woodworking. Secondary school sewing and cooking. High school nothing.

Shop was heavily discouraged for college-track students when I went through high school, both by the administration in terms of guidance counseling and timing of the classes, as well as through heavy social reinforcement by peers.

Perfect example of why so many people hate high school. "Avoid this thing you're interested in because it won't help your career prospects. Also it's a waste of time."

Pretty much this at my high school as well. They had a shop class and auto repair class. I really wish I had taken those (I did take shop in middle school though).

Largely we had to choose -- take the college prep classes (AP whatever, languages) OR trades classes. There was definitely classism -- "trade classes are for poor kids". =(

I would much rather schools require things like: financial literacy, and building/repairs/cooking. They are lifelong skills and very useful. There's no reason its an either or proposition.

I don't think mine did. Maybe. I remember hearing one classmate mention shop once, but maybe I misheard him or he was joking or something. If we did have a shop class, it wasn't advertised, I don't know who taught it or where the shop was.

Mine did, but in my sophomore year, they were cut due to budget constraints that failed to meet a referendum. Industrial tech, foods, automotive, and welding all got the axe. Music and sports only stuck around because of the boosters. The Cisco and CAD classes stuck around because the local community college sponsored them, which is how I ended up where I am today I guess.

'Design & Technology' (woodworking, little metal, textiles, food, etc.) is on the curriculum in the UK, so I did that. Had to take one variant at GCSE, I did electronics. (Having waited practically my entire school life to have a lesson that was electronics and only electronics!)

But it irks me to this day that the language I opted for, Latin, was dropped that annus, because not enough others signed up.

You can't please everyone. (I did like wood/metal work though, just not as much by far as electronics. I'd be much more interested now though - I watch an awful lot of it on YouTube.)

To be completly honest, we had a lot of classes of metalworking, woodworking, textiles, etc in our school before the '89 Revolution in Romania.

I really enjoyed it and it made me love working with materials and building physical things.

Still writing software...But renovating my house was a nice way to remember all that lost skills.

I wish I had taken anything but latin in HS. Only reason I did it was because of colleges requiring foreign language classes, and by the time I had graduated, I didn't have any plans of going to college.

Less machine learning, more learning machining?

Less training models, more model trains

How about robotics? It would allow you to combine mechanical engineering with CS.

A lot of modern mechanical engineering practice is building and using software.

Source: am a mechanical engineer who works on my industry's software

I like to build synthesizers.

Add me too. Somehow the joy of seeing things being built from raw materials in the real world equates that of complex software being created out of nothing. But the finite element of the real world has that extra satisfying element: no dependencies to update, (mostly) no security patches, generally less maintenance, and it lasts longer.

No undo button. CTRL-z is the thing you will miss most in the real world.

True, for immediate things having this ability is a godsend. But as software and bugs "dry up", it can get just as hard to chisel out as physical material.

Timber framing here. That's woodworking.

Funny, I want to move to a farm and keep goats and chickens (I am a Systems Architect). I still want to code in my spare time, if only to just pass on the skills to my offspring.

Did this 25 years ago. Never looked back.

eta: Admittedly I did a bunch of design/architecture consulting and teaching tech courses for the first decade or so to pay for the farm. Consulting is a good way to keep your hand in, and teaching serves as a great marketing platform for the consulting work.

The great thing about chickens is that they debug your farm for you :-)

the downside is you have to 'install' and continuously 'run' a shovel

Have you ever worked on a farm? If not make sure you understand exactly what it entails. Most people who've never done it vastly underestimate how much work it is.

That said, a small hobby farm with goats and chickens doesn't take much work. But going on vacation can be problematic.

Damnit, that was my plan too, only I have no passive income, so customers (or contracting) would be important. Hopefully this trend doesn't continue to become a glut of Silicon Valley woodworkers...

I won't move away from my main job for a while, but I do want to move to a lifestyle where I grow all my own food. It's a very interesting problem, of whether a single person/family can be mostly self-sufficient on food while spending only a small part of their day growing the said food.

Lots of biology, perhaps a little bit of tech thrown in, if it helps.

I thought about this as well. I think that I'd be mostly okay on the vegetable front but I don't think that I'm up to plucking chickens or raising animals. I would also need a bigger yard!

I am pretty okay with it. I eat meat. I have done the dirty work in the past, and I am willing to do it again.

I'm pretty sure that the animals would become my friends.

I think you easily can, the difficulty comes with whether you can be happy with what you're limited to, so more a question of personal tolerance for lack of variety in order to be happy with your food, IMO.

> passive income

Just curious: is this income 100% passive?

There’s no such thing, there’s just varying degrees of risk vs leverage.

Of course there is, within a defined timeframe. If I bought 5-year government bond last year, then this year it's 100% passive income to me. I don't have to do absolutely anything in order to get it this year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com