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Now that you mention it, I have always enjoyed that general feeling of resourcefulness. I've talked about this with other people, but given my fairly eclectic background I usually feel like I can handle a pretty wide variety of problems. It's a very centering feeling, so it would make sense as to why other people worry about being overinvested in just one skill.

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Honestly, after being a gentleman farmer for 15 years or so now, I've come to realize that farmers were the original hackers. In this sense, there's almost a coming-home aspect to software developers wanting to do farm work.

I've never been so proud as when I figured out how to rig up the water nipple in a way that the pigs wouldn't rip it off the wall for the umpteenth time. And my solution probably wouldn't work for most other farmers. It's a design of circumstance and an appreciation of material and the brutal-ness of animals. Livestock are 10x worse on your designs than your average web site user.

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