Why software engineers like woodworking
zainrizvi.io
zainrizvi.io
For me, a huge chunk of each project’s fun was planning. Going through my first two prototypes in Sketchup (rather than in real life) was a massive amount of fun. That part really was not so different to hacking code, really.
The physical work itself is then completely different to software engineering. Nothing is simple — every step of the project presents some unique problem that you have to work around carefully. Maybe you forgot to include the width of the saw in a measurement. Or your stock has a knot in exactly the wrong place. Or you didn’t plan the assembly in the best way to optimise for clamping. Or you drip glue awkwardly and have to clean the first of six benches up before oiling. Or you want to add a shamfer in an awkward place to a piece you’ve already partly assembled.
Imagine having to stop work every few hours to hone the edge on an IDE that’s gone blunt. Imagine running out of 8mm if-statements (dowels) and having to improvise some more so you can peg a project together.
There’s no homogeneity with a natural product. Everything is slow and methodical with few opportunities to hack / test / prototype. You have to think and solve problems that you never thought would happen in a new kind of way because you can’t roll back or undo.
Above all, there are many things you just cannot automate. Sanding up the frame of a pergola getting it ready for oiling is going to be O(n) at best, with only ever a single processor to throw at the problem which itself is hard bounded by mealtimes and hours-in-day.
I love it because it’s not like software.
So emacs?
It’s funny, but I often think how similar they are after doing a project. Maybe I haven’t written enough software for it to feel routine, but I often enjoy the unique and unexpected challenges in each that require creative thinking to solve.
One interesting woodworking tip I carried over was “Know your tolerance”, i.e. does it need to be accurate to within an inch, an eighth, etc. I often apply that when working on software now (i.e. how “perfect” and bug free does this component really need to be?)
People often say that “code is malleable” and you can change anything, whereas working with wood and tools is unforgiving. I actually think they’re comparable again, in that your time is what costs the most, and you can fix anything with minor materials cost compared to the time cost. Throwing away a piece of wood I worked on for a while and messed up isn’t much different than deleting a working branch that didn’t pan out. (Working with a contractor makes this more apparent. They’ll happily change almost anything after they’ve done it if you’re willing to pay for it).
If it's going to be outdoors in the weather over a very long period of time I would not count on glue (unless you have very good process control and know exactly what the long term properties will be) but I'd use steel to connect the various wooden bits, typically hole through (large diameter), then epoxy the hole and then drill again (smaller diameter). That stops the wood around the hole from rotting away. You also want to take care in what kind of wood you use in the first place a nice wood for stuff like that is Tamarack, which doesn't rot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larix_laricina
Combined with stainless steel hardware that should last longer than you will.
Obligatory link (often featured on HN): http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
But in actuality, it's often the case that one can fix physical things with a few well-applied hammer blows, especially in woodworking.
With some non-wood materials it's much harder to make something fit where it doesn't fit.
In software, it's usually impossible.
I used to be a Carpenter and Joiner. I gained some financial qualifications through distance learning and needed some experience.
The guy who hired me told me later that there was some resistance from the team to my joining. He told them that if I could work out winding stairs, accounts would be no problem!
Regarding the ability to fix with a hammer, I would say that with software humans tended to just work around the poor fit!
Lol I guess you have not seen some of the code I have trying to use reactive programming at all costs.
In all seriousness though, I think software is quite flexible. A lot of what programmers do is take two APIs which don’t quite go together and find a way to bridge the gap.
Even the word “shim” is borrowed from woodworking and used in programming as well.
I think the analogy for a software hack in the real world is not a hammer blow but rather, pieces of string tying together things that don't want to work with one another.
Strings tend to wear with use, and eventually break, sometimes catastrophically; whereas pieces that were forced to fit, usually stay put forever.
This sounds like IntelliJ. Have to restart it every once in a while, invalidate caches, tweak some settings, sometimes re-import the project. Oops, an update arrived and now all your settings are reset to bizarre values. That's another few hours trying to get it right again.
Maybe when intellij tells you it wants to update again, just tell it no
https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2006/04/
> For years I've had it drummed into my head that you always have to keep your systems patched, if you aren't running the latest security fixes, the script kiddies will eat you alive, running a six month old OS is like leaving your front door wide open, blah blah blah. Well you know what? Fuck that noise. I'm done upgrading anything ever. The next time I get this shit into a state that seems even remotely stable, I'm never touching it again. If we get hacked, oh well. I have backups. It has got to be less work to recover from than constantly dealing with this kind of nonsense.
Or possibly this CodingHorror blog entry that summarizes a few other instances of jwz saying this:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you-so...
I mention this because the alternative is to have a cutoff of 90 minutes before you leave, and then have a lot of days where you end up with 45+ minutes to kill before it's acceptable to go home. What can you do in this time that makes sense? Basic maintenance is one thing. Rebooting your machine, restarting that IDE, clearing up disk space, upgrading things. Documentation is another. Cleaning up the Wiki is a good thing, especially on that odd day when you finish a project 1pm on Friday and starting something new makes no sense.
But for upgrading software? I think the best option is to look at your team and think, "who would I go to if my code/machine is behaving like the magic smoke got out?" Those people should be doing all of the upgrades, and then reporting their success/failures to everyone else.
I think what Jamie is seeing here though is the downside of open source. Nobody is getting paid to care as much about your use case as you care about it. Sometimes that's empowering, but it's also a huge responsibility. People who pay a lot for software are trying to delegate that responsibility. Win, lose, or draw, that's why they do it.
And what Jamie is missing here is hackers with a vendetta. "If we get hacked, oh well. I have backups." They know you have backups. If they just want to count coup, then your backups will be fine. But I've known of two different services where a slighted user hacked them and made it hurt.
In the first case it was something I hadn't used for a year or two, but I knew a guy who knew a guy who got banned. Found out through my friend that this guy put a time bomb in the backups, and managed to kill their server and all of the backups on the same day. That site was down for months, and almost didn't come back at all.
In the second case, the hackers didn't even take down the site. They exploited a kernel bug and logged all of the private conversations of the administrators, then cherry picked all of the worst bits and some spoilers and posted them online. That site was supposed to be down for a month+, and I think was down for almost 3.
I had instant flashbacks of memory leaks in eclipse.
If you use
#import friends
> Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'friends' in '/creakingstairs/people/`
#require loyalty
#require compatible
#require sincerity
#require compassion
...
on edit: the old it's / its problem got me.
I dunno dude, that sounds just like software to me, lol
100s of hours of wood working is nothing, A wood worker that does this for a living with 1000s of hours doesn't run into these issues nearly as often, same for senior devs with programming.
- How can I get these parts/cuts etc accurate without measuring them all each time? Or without measuring at all but just transferring the dimension.
- Can I clamp that glue joint together with the weird angle?
- How can I get the most from these sheets of plywood / beams of lumber? How to fit the stuff in the car, or do I split up etc?
- Can I make 2 things of the same dimension with 1 cut?
- Can I make that without needed other tools?
When I realized that "measure once, cut twice" is actually the superior methodology I laughed for a week.
(As in, set up your cuts or use jigs so that you aren't trying to mark 34 5/16 inches on 6 separate pieces of wood and expecting them to be the same length afterwards.)
Sounds like my brain...
Very true with wood unfortunately.
And then there's just the efficiency of having a little workshop where you fix stuff in a jiffy and hardly notice the amount of things that get their lifespan doubled. Good for your bank account as well the environment.
Oh, and seeing your children grow up with the idea that their parents just make/fix stuff, and that repairing things is the natural way to go about life. My three year old son regularly takes his portable toy kitchen, his toy tools, and starts 'repairing' it. That's priceless.
If I owned an old cottage or something like that, I would be quite comfortable doing DIY work on it. It's a little bit like doing DIY auto repairs on a brand-new Acura TSX vs. a 2002 Honda Civic. The stakes are different.
I think its quite the opposite. If you owned an old cottage with exposed hardwood trim, stained glass window, exposed hardwood stairs with a carpet runner, and custom built-ins it would be much harder to DIY improvements. That type of older house may also have older plumbing, older electrical, and possibly plaster walls, all of which will require more care and knowledge to DIY things than new electrical, plumbing or drywall.
Take for instance fixing a piece of trim that is an exposed hardwood vs. fixing a piece of trim that could be PVC/composite and some-shade-of-white. You can caulk over mistakes with white trim vs. trying to do a miter on exposed hardwood trim with not-square walls.
"The only difference between me and the guy who goes to Home Depot and does it himself is that I get it right the first time. This isn't rocket science."
His entire value proposition is that he can do something at high quality and get it done quickly. Yours is that you can do something high quality because we assume that you can take multiple attempts until you get it right.
If you are making something like cabinet doors that are mostly labor and not much wood, you can easily make them for one fifth the cost of what you’d pay from ikea… but tons of labor!
Aside from the pleasure of just doing something on your own, what you will probably have is something unique. People making electronic projects will probably adding features not available retail, or clothing in patterns and stitch design their own, etc.
Lots of way to value something other than $
You can definitely pick up used solid wood furniture for cheaper than building it yourself (especially if you consider the opportunity cost of your time), but you might not get exactly what you want.
There is some arbitrage as certain species of wood are cheaper if you are closer to where they come from (for example Douglas fir is cheaper on the west coast vs pine on the east coast), and for a small item it can be built where the wood is cheapest and shipped from there.
However, I think it’s not likely to make that large of a difference. Wholesale lumber prices aren’t that far off from what a hobbyist pays if you go to the same places.
I built my workbench out of $5 of scrap wood by buying a homemade platform that had been used for judging volleyball games, because no one else wanted a volleyball judging platform and I was willing to break it apart and cart away a couple hundred pounds of lumber.
I recently purchased a good quantity of rough cut maple, locust and oak for around 10-25 cents a board foot from another auction because the owner of the woodshop in question was retiring and everything must go.
When I build furniture there is no MDF or masonite anywhere in the build, no veneer, no staples (or pin nails) ... usually no fasteners at all.
And as had been pointed out in this thread — it is the exact height, width, depth that I want, with the features I want and the wood and finish that I want.
Started out building MAME cabinets, BTW, ha ha.
"Why would you do something to augment your experience of reality if it's inefficient?"
Hey, that's why I'm on the internet. I could hardly talk about woodworking to actual carpenters in real life, could I?
Pre-pandemic, I built my own cabinets in my garage with cabinet-grade plywood and Ikea butcherblock counters. I over-bought the wood by about 50% (because of a stupid mistake) and bought a really expensive track saw, and I still saved like 25-50% compared to buying the cabinets pre-made with the features I wanted. Even cheap cabinets would still have been slightly more expensive than DIY.
Granted, my cabinets are not perfect and I wouldn't put them in someone's kitchen, but they are more than good enough for what I need them for and both me and the wife are happy with them.
For some people, this comes with a condition: "as long as it's terrible" ;)
Also if you don't want the expense, there's plenty of small things you can make with a handful of tools. Whittling and carving is quite cheap and very satisfying.
If you are just starting out, I'd recommend starting with just the core tools [1] and a block plane.
[1] https://www.lie-nielsen.com/nodes/4219/home-education-gettin...
Alternatively you can take them to a kiln to get dried and the price still ends up being far below what you would pay per board foot for S2S lumber.
But, that much lumber is worth a lot of money. I think most domestic hardwoods are currently in the $5-$10 range per board foot (e.g. 12"x1"x1"). And that's rough sawn, you still need to mill that into usable pieces.
I have been a software engineer all my working life, and I absolutely despise woodworking or anything that smacks of DIY. I find them unbelievably stressful and frustrating partly because I can see how I want things to be, they never work out nearly that good and I can never fix them.
We must be dealing with different codebases
So one more good reason not to do any woodstuff at home when I can work with perfectly predictable things like the rust borrow checker instead :-)
If you need another tool or another component you can just search for it on the internet and if it's available you can have it in seconds. No trips to a shop that may or may not have what you need, or queueing, or explaining what you need to a shop assistant who couldn't really give a shit, or being upsold on some other thing that you don't really need or understand, etc.
Also, crucially for me personally, there's no mess that needs to be tidied away before the rest of the family come find you. There's no storage area needed for half-finished crap, odds and ends you can't decide if you need in future, potentially dangerous power tools, that kind of thing.
Building software is like taking all the fun parts of DIY and leaving all the boring / dangerous / physically taxing parts behind, and you can pretty much do it wherever you have a power supply and internet connection. That's why I first loved it and why I continue to do it today.
There is always an undo, just get another board.
> Building software is like taking all the fun parts of DIY and leaving all the boring / dangerous / physically taxing parts behind, and you can pretty much do it wherever you have a power supply and internet connection. That's why I first loved it and why I continue to do it today.
I have a different point of view. The software you build is ephemeral. You can't show it to someone. The architecture and the beautify of it's interplay is hidden and it's art is only available to you. I can show you my dovetail and let you feel how smooth the finish is. It's real. You can explorer it with your senses.
Bookcase that fell off a wall shattering a glass desk and filling an entire room with books and papers laced with splinters? Yup. That was me.
Shed with gaps inbetween the walls large enough you can see in from the outsides? Also me.
School woodworking project to make an engraving that was so terrible it transmuted into an ashtray even though none of my family smoke? You got it. Me.
Ikea bed assembly where I got so frustrated that my friends banned me from helping assemble it and did it for me even though it was my bed? Err I'm not proud of it, but it did happen.
I could go on, but in any case. I don't like woodworking and I have plenty of good reasons not to. Perfectionism is not the problem.
There are uncountable skills to learn in one lifetime: there can be joy in accepting that one will always be crappy at most crafts. Celebrate tiny improvements.
I think we all have an IQ of 60 in different areas of our lives: being kind to our low IQ selves and encourage the best out of our poor weird misfired brains, like we would any child. Encourage the disabled you, usually nobody else will help much, or worse, lots of people will meanly cut you down. Be kind to yourself, mostly say positive things and be constructive.
This one sounds as the worst "failure", but in general, hanging a book case off the wall is hard even for experienced professionals: books are notoriously heavy, and walls are of vastly different constructions, so sometimes, hanging it up is simply... impossible (eg. with a drywall if you can't find the drywall frame behind, or if that is too weak).
When I did remodelling of my place, I've planned for steel support behind wherever I wanted to hang heavy items (like a double vanity sink unit [people also lean on them], book cases, TV with a wooden panel behind it and similar). And you need to use special screws for different wall types and load (concrete anchors, wall/rawl plugs, toggle bolts, drywall anchor plugs... — though my English names might be off for these :).
So in short, don't hold this one much against yourself: it's sometimes hard even for seasoned pros, let alone hobbyists. I am just a seasoned hobbyist that's a sucker for hanging items (or actually, having clear floor to clean).
Anyway, the thing that attracts me to woodworking (and previously, chipboard cabinet construction) is that you get to make your own ideas: just like with software. But building stuff is not limited to software development or woodworking, and while there are plenty of software engineers enjoying woodworking, there are other ways to enjoy building your own stuff, and some might even enjoy not building anything after they've been doing it for 8+ hours a day.
if it makes you feel any better, there's advantages to that too. If the wind can get through it, it's unlikely that moisture will be trapped inside. as long as the gaps aren't so wide that it's raining into the shed, anyway.
It sounds radical but it feels important to my mental health to keep my woodworking physical an analog as possible. Now, I'm still a power tool junkie so I'm not about to give up my table saw or planer.
Power tool junkie FTW too.
I do love heading into the shop and just making something though.
Hand tools take a bit more practice but the rush of seeing your skill progress never goes away. Just yesterday I made a well fitting mortise and tenon joint. This is something I've done a thousand times, yet I still get the deep sense of satisfaction every time I see it set nicely.
I bet I could square up rough stock with my hand plane faster than your power planer/joiner, too. Cutting to size the hundreds of 1X3" I needed earlier, on the other hand...
However I've picked up some skills along the way. It's nice to be able to design and build small projects around the home.
If I do plans, it is using a pencil. But mostly I just improvise. There is only so much value in doing plans for one off projects.
It's now got to a point that the requests, and "He can build that" comments to friends are not accompanied with the trademark eye roll.
All the points the author hit ring true - planning, design, tool choice, etc have similar parallels to code and systems I work with during the day. But, I can cook meals for my family knowing that I built that space, then sit on the deck watching the wind in the trees knowing how many pieces of pressure treated lumber are holding me up and how it felt putting them all together. I never get that visceral connection using a web app.
Once my wife learned of my plans, the requests for custom pieces started rolling in. Knowing that whatever I build has an eager recipient awaiting it is rocket fuel for motivation.
And since it's my wife asking for it, it's easier to justify buying the tools I "need".
(My mill is a Sharp LMV 49 DVS btw). Lathes are a better starting point for most beginners BTW. But really both are fine to start with if in budget.
You mean Hilti, right?
There seems to be some connection here. I think it's just that hackers love making stuff, and woodworking is one of the most ancient and fundamental ways of making stuff. Materials and equipment are plentiful and easily obtained. A basic wood shop can be put together in a garage without special facilities. No special qualifications are needed, outside of time and practice. Almost anyone can get started, but the skill ceiling is high.
I got out of HTML email a long time ago, thankfully.
i’ve been responding to marketing emails recently — often CC’ing generic accounts like marketing@company, help@company, etc to try to reach actual humans in the loop. the process has been fascinating to me and the number of (intentional or unintentional) choke-points makes me wonder if — even in the more enlightened organizations i’ve worked in — i could ever stand a chance of understanding our email campaigns, inside and out.
So, no replies, but my grandmother got one of the emails my agency designed! That one made me feel queasy.
Apologies if what I said was misleading. That agency laid me and over a hundred coworkers off; hence no qualms about divulging our primary customer.
I also find the products of my work aesthetically pleasing or useful. I am very happy, grateful to be able-bodied to do any amount of woodworking. I hope everyone else gets to enjoy something like that feeling for even just a minute.
I got into woodworking as my first real job. It’s such a great pastime too, though. Just like this post says.
Something I highly recommend if you find woodworking too expensive is to look into what you can do with basic hand tools and found wood. Try making spoons from green wood, for example. If you can get into it, it’s practically free and incredibly gratifying.
There are plenty of cool things you can make and even gift to people without a single power tool.
It started as building project boxes for my Rasp Pi projects, and scaled up from there.
In fact, when we were putting together a highchair, one of the legs was the wrong parity (we got two of Left leg instead of R+L), so I pulled it out to the drill press and drilled the proper holes. The company gave it to us for free for our trouble, which basically paid for the drill press.
Also built small bookshelves for the nursery to match the wife's "Vision", coat hangers / key rack near the side door. All kinds of useful things!
These days, I have my own little workshop for carpentry and welding when I'm not writing code. I think it's all about the fact that you're using your hands, it "feels" more involved and intimate than designing software sometimes and it's relaxing.
All my woodworking involve metal inserts (m4/m5), and standard machines bolts. It takes more time (but I switched to 5min epoxy, instead 24h one), but it's totally reversible, and I have proper stainless steel fasteners, and I can use threadlock (if I feel like it).
However, while nice and all - there is not much 'like' part into woodworking.
When you work all week in 20 dimensional non-Riemannian manifolds with torsion, it's really nice to come back to Euclidean 3D space and make wood chips the weekend!
Woodworking scratches that "build something" itch.
Plus, it has a high SAF (spouse approval factor). If I spend a Saturday writing a software tool, my wife is wondering why the lawn wasn't mowed. If I spend it building a coffee table, she's delighted :D
It's to the point where I have to either start rotating out pieces or attend an art show and try to sell some. Just running out of wall space in the house. To attend an art show means I think my work is good enough that someone might pay for it and same as with programming, theres some imposter syndrome happening here.
We'll see...
scrolled through until i found something i could do or was interesting.
I didn't start to truly enjoy it until i stopped watching tutorials, took what I learned and made what I wanted to make honestly. But it took the tutorials to gain some skill to do what I wanted to do.
For a lot of people, software engineering is a craft. It's not exclusively about completing a task as it is working on something, getting into a flow state and designing/building something elegantly for a specific outcome. Woodworking is no different really and probably why so many software engineers like it as a hobby too.
Interestingly enough, I remember visiting and touring the https://www.lie-nielsen.com/ showroom. The business has been around for years, but from what I remember, they mentioned developing a really strong community of developers/engineers over the last 10 years or so.
> Something with wood
It's a short, dumbed-down version of "screw it, I'd rather do something with wood instead" and every dev recites it every once in a while when they encounter strange bugs or other annoyances.
Whereas woodworking is highly tangible and physical, which can make you feel connected to the work.
The same can be said for many other types of craft work too...
I like to take photos because when I press the button a photo is taken, it's not going to output an error that will need a debugger to solve. I like to draw because when I move the pencil on the paper, a line appears, instead of the paper having an error message that requires me to contact their support to solve. I also don't need to update my paper to be compatible with my pencil.
I like those things because of the certainty that a specific action will lead to a specific result.
As with everything, name brand blades can have prices that appear expensive to a complete outsider.
[1]: https://www.stigasports.com/eu/dynasty-carbon-xu-xin-edition...
Something like this: https://www.stigasports.com/eu/allround-evolution-table-tenn...
Can take you very far if you're just beginning. By the time you're actually tired of it (probably a few years into the future), you're knowledgeable enough to figure out if you want something more expensive and exactly what you'd like.
>Very offensive 5+2-ply blade.
It took me a moment to get this, the racket looked pretty pleasant to me. I wonder what makes a racket more offensive or defensive, would it be the shape? Or maybe the weight distribution.
It's the weight, weight distribution and rigidity.
A very heavy, stiff and top heavy blade would be very offensive, since it would generate a lot of speed but you'd be lacking in control.
> And the answer is now clear:
> Find something to build.
My great-grandfather was born ~110 years ago and became a master machinist. Kept those giant steam locomotives functioning. Grandfather was a construction worker who went into civil engineering and two of his brothers made airplanes in their garages, father is an electrical engineer turned software engineer and now I’m in software as well. Hopefully the party isn’t over just yet.
If I lived a hundred years ago I’d like to think I’d be building as well.
Wait till you start writing code that deals make requests over the internet
Or has to talk to hardware
You'll see the real world :)
I can think of a few reason why software engineer appear to like woodworking.
- They are overrepresented on the internet, me, a software engineer who mounted a shelf a few years ago is more likely to exchange woodworking tips on the internet than my granddad who was an actual 8 fingered woodworker.
- If most of the people you know are software engineers, the ones who like woodworking are likely to be software engineers too, a simple statistical bias.
- Woodworking is technical work, software engineering is technical work, it is more related than, say, team sports, dancing or organizing birthday parties (some software engineers do that too of course, but it is not something they are known for).
- Software engineers earn the right amount of money for that kind of hobby. Woodworking is rather expensive, good tools are not cheap, neither is the space your workshop takes and the wood, especially now. But is not as expensive as racing cars and flying helicopters.
You build a working environment of your own (with your choice of VSTs, presets that you have saved...), you definitely have way too many tools, you have a finite monetary budget (although the toughest limitation is your time and your sanity), you have the fastest feedback loop ever, and hopefully you'll have some users eventually :_)
I've got a Shopsmith, which is a reconfigureable multi-purpose machine. It's a drill press, turning lathe, table saw, jigsaw, and several others. You turn different locks to swivel the machine around and attach well-engineered implements to make the single motor power a different woodworking configuration.
As an engineer, it's fantastic. You get to make the machine do what you want. And you are rewarded for being careful and measuring things as you reconfigure, because the swivels and joints introduce the possibility of mis-alignment. Mis-alignment would show up in the finished product (the cut wood). So being fussy pays off!
For programmers, it's great.
I really like this article though, and relate completely. I do metalworking and fabrication (building race cars) as a side hobby because having a tactile, physical thing to tinker with helps cool off from the daily software work.
I told the second engineer about the first one, after he told me he'd started getting into woodworking. I was laughing, like: "be careful, you're next!" and sure enough he was.
Who loves deleting code? Everyone who’s been around long enough, that’s who!
I used to go to a weekly class where I had stationary machines at my disposal, together with a teacher, and it is certainly helpful in saving time when prepping stock. But it is in no way necessary for woodworking and if you are a hobbyist doing physically small projects (boxes, decorative items, instruments, etc) the amount of time saved isn't even that great.
A saw and a chisel and some elbow grease will go a long way.
I started with just using a saw, and then gradually added tools based on what my projects needed
The furniture thus far as been mainly functional - not that it is unattractive, but it is all very form-follows function. I rather like that in general, but also see my mistakes and room for improvement. But then I'm probably moving soon, and may well need to rethink and downsize furniture anyway.
Close enough to drying glue
Grandfather was a farmer, father a polytechnic teacher, … i have learned to work with wood, metal, cows, roofs, ducks, cars, … and computers.
The last one paid more in our era. I still do the others when they make sense.
I find woodworking quiet and beautiful. Metalworking, not so much :)
They usually offer classes if you don't want to start yourself. But you can learn a ton by looking up cabinetmaking or something else on Youtube. For a real trip, watch joinery -- it's mesmerizing.
Other than that, I started by just picking up a saw and going to town, and quickly googling "How do I" to find out much more than I wanted to know. It pays to learn about the basic tools first. Table saw, Router table, Chop saw, Drill press, etc.
He focuses heavily on using hand tools instead of machines, so much more suitable for apartments. He's also budget conscious, and tries to show ways of achieving things without spending a ton on lots of expensive or specialised tools.
It isn't valid only for woodworking. Anything that isn't very complicated and doesn't take a very long time, will do. Even repairing old cars or bikes.
I'm pretty sure sanding takes up 90% of time spent on my projects.
Are there any active communities for that?
carpentry ~= software engineering (within an organization)
I think woodworking is attractive to software engineers because its akin to building side/toy software projects. Autonomy, building from scratch, requirements/AC's self-defined etc.
Software engineering professionally is more like carpentry/trades. Carpenters work in teams, work on one specific part of a house and may not touch other parts of the house, do not design but mainly implement. You might even liken SWEs to tradesmen generally in that there can be a high degree of specialization: plumbers, electricians, finish carpenters, tilers etc being the devOps, secOps, backend, frontend etc.
Woodworking != carpentry
Again, a big part of the draw to woodworking for SWE is the same as the draw for a software side/toy project: it's more fun and fulfilling to build something in it's entirety, from scratch, and by yourself (especially if you do the opposite in your day job).
Also, be wary of quitting your job to become a woodworker. Woodworking professionally does not necessarily resemble what is posted in this article or linked to. Many woodworkers start out as carpenters and learn on the job or as a side hustle to carpentry. Many woodworkers do not design the pieces they make/install. Many parts of the piece you are making could be prefab. The amount of time you'll be able to spend manually sharpening your hand tools will be limited. Grass is always greener: physical work is rewarding, but anyone who has done carpentry and/or woodworking their whole life will have infirmities, ailments, and maybe even disabilities caused by their career. There is woodworking fantasy and their is woodworking reality.
And also, tastes have changed and most don't care to pay for quality woodwork. Odds are the wealthy homeowner is going to take your beautiful mahogany built-ins and paint them purple because that's what the interior designer asked for. And that's if your lucky. Most folks don't buy custom built furniture, they buy IKEA. By all means take up woodworking and quit you SWE job, but assume that you will very quickly dip into the fortune you amassed as a SWE. I think there should be more craft in this world, so I wouldn't discourage it outright -- but make sure you have the material means to sustain this woodworking fantasy.
It's the small things, sometimes.
A few years later, a different teacher also lost part of a finger on a table saw, just working on something in his garage.
These weren't major factors, but have been partially responsible for me never developing a taste for hardware. I enjoyed metal shop in 6th grade for a bit, but... it got very loud, sometimes very hot, and the cost of doing anything wrong was great pain or death.
Contrast that with "nerdy" computer stuff... I could sit, relaxed, and 'create' stuff myself (often just typing in code from magazines and books, but it was a start!)
You can still do much worse of course, like chewing off all your fingers in a jointer or embedding an angle grinder wheel in your face.
My father was a professional cabinet maker and a decade ago he built a new kitchen from scratch. The only power tools he used were a table saw (which admittedly is one of the worse) and a belt sander. Everything else he did with hand tools.
I'm just curious what era of safety devices were likely available.
We were in a 'newer' school district - the middle school was less than 10 years old at that time. All equipment was relatively 'new'.
It seems clear that using (riving knife) + (blade guard) + (push sticks or similar) + (feather board) + (careful adherence to safe operation) eliminates most of the risk.
I'm still unclear how much risk remains when following those rules. Maybe because most injuries I hear about involve people skipping at least one of those five elements.
lots of people like going outside - SWEs aren't disproportionate in this sense.
Add a necessity for distraction free periods to build mental maps of software. Add a modern HR policy. Add an open floor plan to facilitate glances around.
Invent a device to turn sexual tension into electricity. Power the office for free!