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.
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 :-)
We must be dealing with different codebases
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.
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.
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.