There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle: you can “overhaul” it, or you can ride it. On the whole, I am not sure that a man who takes his pleasure overhauling does not have the best of the bargain. He is independent of the weather and the wind; the state of the roads troubles him not. Give him a screw-hammer, a bundle of rags, an oil-can, and something to sit down upon, and he is happy for the day. He has to put up with certain disadvantages, of course; there is no joy without alloy. He himself always looks like a tinker, and his machine always suggests the idea that, having stolen it, he has tried to disguise it; but as he rarely gets beyond the first milestone with it, this, perhaps, does not much matter. The mistake some people make is in thinking they can get both forms of sport out of the same machine. This is impossible; no machine will stand the double strain. You must make up your mind whether you are going to be an “overhauler” or a rider.
Personally, I prefer to ride, therefore I take care to have near me nothing that can tempt me to overhaul. When anything happens to my machine I wheel it to the nearest repairing shop. If I am too far from the town or village to walk, I sit by the roadside and wait till a cart comes along.
My chief danger, I always find, is from the wandering overhauler. The sight of a broken-down machine is to the overhauler as a wayside corpse to a crow; he swoops down upon it with a friendly yell of triumph. At first I used to try politeness. I would say:
“It is nothing; don’t you trouble. You ride on, and enjoy yourself, I beg it of you as a favour; please go away.”
Experience has taught me, however, that courtesy is of no use in such an extremity.
Now I say:
“You go away and leave the thing alone, or I will knock your silly head off.”
This is exactly why I switched my sport of choice from cycling to running. In cycling, I kept getting pulled into the gear and tinkering. (It didn't help that I raced cyclocross, so during race season, every Monday was spent cleaning and repairing the result of the previous day's races). TBH, it was fun, but if I spent as much time training as I did tinkering, maybe I would have had some decent race results.
With running, it's harder to believe that the gear is what's holding me back from performance. Get a rotation of shoes, and that's pretty much it. My shorts and tops probably need to be replaced at this point before their growing transparency scandalizes the neighborhood, but as long as they're light and sweat-wicking, it doesn't matter too much what I replace them with.
But then I made the mistake of getting into rock climbing...
I always enjoyed running becasue I could be ready in like 2 minutes vs going for a bike ride that involved at a minimum kitting up, pumping the tires, and more often than that for the type of riding I like (cross/mtb) I'd also have to drive to a destination. Now I can't run due to injury/surgery, so I have a bike on the trainer now and that's my tv time. minimizes the bike futzing.
That's part of the reason I love running too. A minimum of fuss. It's funny that you mention rock climbing, because it's the same reason I love bouldering. You only need shoes. Climbing has something for everyone - trad for the gear heads, bouldering for the people who can't be bothered with planning, sport for people somewhere in the middle.
I do some triathlons a couple to times a year, and I find it enjoyable to beat people on a steel frame bike with lower quality / older gear.
Also riding a recumbent really gives you perspective on what a fast bike is. No amount of carbon fiber can beat the more streamlined and comfortable position.
> Also riding a recumbent really gives you perspective on what a fast bike is. No amount of carbon fiber can beat the more streamlined and comfortable position.
What is hilarious in road cycling is all the middle aged men who really do believe that kit = faster.
If you have any basic bike of a reasonable standard, it is ALL about hours, weight and power. Nothing else. On a one hr climb up a 10% mountain, nothing is gonna save your fat ass.
Yeah, having a 3k$ carbon bike or a 1k$ aluminum model doesn't make a difference that's true. However, having good cycling clothes is way more comfortable, as is a lightweight helmet. A more upright bicycle absolutely robs you of energy due to wind resistance, even at low-ish speeds on flats (30 km/h).
I could exercise on my 40 lbs, 3 speed upright 1940s english roadster in jeans and a sweater for cred, but that doesn't sound fun at all. People who don't cycle (unlike me and you I guess) can't price cycle kit by eye so they'll see me in lycra and think that I'm some dentist when in fact my gear is all very reasonably priced, comfortable and appropriate to my level.
Also, it always bother me that people talk about 10,000$ bikes or whatever which is very far from reality, meanwhile they buy 45,000$ cars when 20,000$ cars exist and no one bats an eye.
That is definitely the best approach in my opinion. Getting the things that help you enjoy the sport/hobby more.
Drumming, nice comfy stool (throne)
Skiing, custom fitted boots
Guitar, take it to a guitar tech so it plays easier
Gardening, good waterproof jacket and hat
I don't think they have any illusions about it. They are enthusiasts and enthusiasts like to spend money on their hobbies. If they can afford it, I don't see the harm.
i just decided that i enjoy working on bikes more than i do riding them and i decided that was fine. What i dislike the most is talking to people on reddit about it. if i need a new part that i dont know where to find google will lead me to the forum that will lead me t owhat i need. if i can't find it i can ask on reddit. but i do not want to sit around on forums talking about bikes. what a waste of time. and look at me, im sitting around in a forum talking about bikes. i'll see myself out.
For rock climbing, stick to bouldering. All you need for bouldering is shoes. The situations where even a chalk bag is required are very particular outliers, as are situations where gloves would be a consideration. You could spend plenty of money on shoes of course, same as running, but once you find comfy ones you tend to invest in them over and over again. Like running, it really does come down perseverance - I do think there’s a creativity I didn’t expect in bouldering.
I do enjoy bouldering because of its simplicity (little gear, no need to coordinate with others), but sport climbing gives me something that bouldering does not. Maybe it has to do with flow, as it's easier to get into some kind of flow on a 15 meter wall compared to a 4 meter wall. I'm not sure what exactly it is though that makes sport climbing more attractive to me than bouldering.
(I admit though that due to bouldering's simplicity, I do it much more nowadays compared to sport climbing...)
This is one thing I appreciate about swimming. I don’t own the pool, so no fiddling there. My swim trunks require no fiddling. The only thing that could possibly require fiddling are my goggles, but I use Swedish goggles that are so simple (two pieces of plastic and a piece of rubber - there isn’t even a gasket), they don’t require any fiddling.
can you recommend water proof earplugs? i have a ruptured ear drum and have to protect it but the wax moldable ones never seem to be completely water proof.
But rock climbing doesn't have the gear heads of other hobbies - at least, I've never encountered these. There are definitely people that enjoy the technical aspects of how to best secure yourself with your gear, what knots to use and so on, but otherwise I haven't had many of these discussions.
On that aspect, rock climbing and especially bouldering are very similar to running. Don't get me started on trail running, though...
I know people with certain shoes for certain climbs. If you’re an outdoor climber there’s plenty of gear to be had and debated, from carabiners to anchoring to assisted (or unassisted) belay
Yeah, trad is different, you're right. There are subreddits devoted to displaying the whole trad gear, neatly arranged in dedicated cabinets. I stand corrected, doing mostly sport climbs and boulders.
Isn't it marvellous to simplify. Remove all 'things'.
I feel it in playing guitar, I often only play the most simple of setups (acoustic guitar) as it gets the the root of my itch without distraction, blame or gear desire.
As a guitar player, this really resonates. I now spend almost all my time with my unadorned acoustic, leaving behind the tinkerhole
of my electric guitar and its effects pedals, looper, amp etc.
Oh yes! GAS is real, and seemingly endless. I'm getting better though.
I've had the same two electric guitars for about a decade now, and have no real urge to change them up.
The pedals though. I can't use an amp in the townhouse I'm in, so fell into the rabbit hole of ampless setups. Almost everything is just a new take on a 30-60 year old circuit though, or a model of the same.
I can't handle guitar modelling software. It seems like a really cheap way to go, but it's just endless futzing about. Not only do I need the gear, I need the PC to work too. Nope.
I think somebody once said that this entire industry would fall apart if everybody just learned to use an EQ, and I have to say it feels really accurate. I think I'm almost "done" with gear though, and I can feel my playing getting better as a result.
Happy to note after a couple years using S-Gear that I tinker with it less than I expected and haven't been seriously tempted to buy an amp. I think having the option to try all the presets is satisfying enough, whereas with amps I would always wonder if just one more pedal purchase would find the magic tone. I still need more guitars, though.
For me it was the other way around; We had the episode "Uncle Podger Hangs a Picture" from Three Men in a Boat as a chapter in our English textbook and i remember our Teacher explicitly mentioning his middle name as "Klapka" since it was such an odd name.
If you like old genteel British Humour, you should also checkout Stephen Potter's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Potter) series of books on Gamesmanship. Unfortunately Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to carry them and so you might have to get a hard copy. The classic movie School for Scoundrels (1960) based on these books is available on Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/SchoolForScoundrels1959
Mmm this right here is why for the last two years I've been using Jetbrains IDE and Obsidian as my daily drivers, because my Emacs config isn't _quite_ right and if only I could have a shortcut to tile the buffers according to the golden ratio... but first why isn't the font-face-mode applying to magit... Hey wait, this elisp to convert org-mode to markdown is failing but only in this directory...
You can't possibly be old enough to have met him in person, so I consider you impertinent in using the author's given name. Have a bit of respect and use his last name!
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing this. The word "bummel" (a German word for "stroll") is described wonderfully in the last paragraph of the book, it is quoted here[1].
A modern day example of the above "overhauler" way (a theme familiar to HN): we see many variants of "Look! I've setup the perfect static website!" Then the person goes on to write a single, lonely post on "how to setup a perfect static site", and then ... go silent for 5 years, or forever. They've burnt too much energy in "configuring".
I have been roasted before on the internet for suggesting that bleeding disc brakes was inconvenient. I think this distinction between riders and overhaulers actually explains a lot!
I started off in the "enjoying collecting gear" quadrant of photography, then I heard an insightful comment by a pro: "If you have $5K, you can either buy one good lens and use it to take photos of the pigeons outside your apartment, or spend that money on a destination holiday and take pictures of amazingly beautiful places with your old lens which still works perfectly fine."
I stopped buying new kit and started going on lots of holidays. No regrets so far. I just wish I had the budget for a Nikon Z9 and a holiday, but I don't work in Silicon Valley, so...
Somewhat similar, but within a few years of starting photography I had a DSLR and 4-5 lenses. I was also taking lots of pictures but overtime the allure of the big gear wore off as I realized I didn't want to carry it around anymore. Eventually I downsized to a Fujifilm X100F and its been a wonderful experience!
Yup, bought an old, used point-and-shoot last year, and the low stakes of it have me using it more than my DSLR. Much easier to slip small P&S is my pocket for a vacation or hike. It's got the CHDK firmware on it as well, so it still outputs RAW, and I can keep my development process.
That Z9 will be yesterdays tech in a year or two, and you'll be able to pick it up for a fraction of its current price. It'll still perform exactly as well as it does today, but the gear heads will be onto the next new thing.
It probably won't see significant price drops for 5+ years, because the pace of development in the DSLR market is slowing down. There are longer and longer gaps between new significant features, which means the price of used cameras isn't going down as fast as they used to.
That is the reason I love gear heads, otherwise I wouldn't have been abke to get the Nikkor lenses I have for the price I paid, and they are all used by the way. That none of those is compatible with the new Z system helps as well.
Because why would a camera and a lense, that was the top of the line back the day, be less suitable today? Not that a Z9 wouldn't be nice, but I have other hobbies as well and want to see places!
That advice surprises me. It's quite possible to go to the most amazingly beautiful place on earth and still take pigeon-dull photos, with or without a fancy camera. I've done it myself. Surely what matters is learning how to see, and to depict?
Oh, and working in Silicon Valley may not be necessary. A non-techy friend of mine bought a medium format camera and took it to Antarctica. But then he is a cardiologist.
Some of the best photos I've taken in my ~12 years as a hobbyist photographer have been less than 30 minutes from home. Despite all the holidays I've been on.
As an ex pro photographer (not great as I am an ex!) but the best camera is the one easy to access and use. While my photos don't have the three dimensional quality they used to have, they are in the moment and captured by doing rather than doing photography.
iPhone Camera. Incredible.
What really rebooted my photography is buying a high quality (well not even all that high, a used Pixma Pro 200) photo printer. There is something special about holding pictures printed on quality paper. They make great gifts (well if they are good!) They look different than on a screen.
I print (good) iphone photos without any retouching or correcting on photo 4x6 and they look great! Doing this without fiddling in lightroom is the closest I've gotten to the experience of film photography but with digital.
It's well known in the reading community that "reading" and "talking about the books you want to read" and "buying and owning books" are all very different things; I guess the missing piece would be "talking about the books you've bought and now own" which is sharing pictures of "shelfies" etc. I'm not really into the last one but the first three are all very enjoyable to me, in very different ways, although I only really enjoy buying physical copies of nonfiction books; for fiction I tend to just go for ebooks.
I've always found the discussion and community around a hobby can be as important as the hobby itself. There's lots of books I like but can't talk to anyone familiar enough to care.
It seems like there's some overlap with the Bartle types from online gaming. You tend to have 4 main motivations to play an massively-multiplayer online game: there's the explorers, the achievers, the socializers, and the killers.
Most hobbies don't literally have a "killer" group (I hope), but maybe the real-world analogous thing is people who enjoy telling other people they suck at their hobby. The other groups seem to apply. You have the people who want to know everything about the hobby, the people who want to be the best at that hobby, and the people who like interacting with that hobby's community. (And just like in online games, too many "killers" can ruin the fun that the socializers are there for. We all know communities that fell apart because they were overrun by snobs and trolls.)
This is something that's been debated over the years, but I think Bartle missed a fifth type, which is people who want to create. In online gaming, these could be the people who actually programmed the game in the first place, or it could be players who are very into user generated content (especially in games like Minecraft where that's a big part of the game).
Similarly there are people who are into gear to the point where they're building their own gear, or even designing original equipment.
I'm that way with music. I'm not very good at guitar or piano or any other instrument and I don't know how to compose, but I got into microtonalism and just intonation, and since proper instruments for that don't really exist (save for continuous-pitch instruments like violin), I've been adapting guitars for a variety of different tunings and building electronic instruments. When you think about it it's pretty weird that I'm learning Kicad and PCB layout because the major third on a 12-EDO instrument is out of tune by about fifteen cents (because the 12th root of 2 to the 4th power is a very crude approximation of 5/4), but sometimes that's just how it goes.
I’ve found some of the most useful people on forums like StackOverflow, have very little experience actually shipping product.
They are often my “go to” people, for things like the correct way to do stuff, or for rabbithole exploration of technology/technique, but it comes more from a place of theory, than it does, from practical application.
This is not always a bad thing. In fact, it can be a very good thing.
I’m very much a “get the job done” type of chap. I get my hands dirty, and regularly get stuff out, and into the world.
But I don’t give myself a lot of time to learn esoteric theory or optimization. I do the thing, but maybe not as well as it could be done, or as effectively.
That’s why I appreciate some of these folks that spend all their time, exploring the whys of the techn[ology|ique]. I’ll buy their books, take their classes, or read their posts, and apply the fruits of their work to mine. One of the authors I respect the most for his amazing knowledge of the depths of Apple tech, had, the last time I checked, just one, rather silly, app on the App Store; but he’s written multiple books, and been a major presence at a lot of conferences.
There’s also a lot to be said for effective communicators. Knowing stuff can be worthless, if there’s no way to transmit the information. Writing books is really difficult. Writing books that people want to read, even more so.
Being a good speaker is also a valuable skill. There are folks with minimal expertise, that I can listen to for hours, and people that really know their stuff, that are great soporifics.
If someone can explain something to me, quickly and clearly, so I “get it,” then that person is valuable to me.
In turn, someone like me, can take their theory, and turn it into a real “thing”; handling all the repetitive, “boring” stuff that is required to get it out the door.
There’s a lot of looking down of noses, between “doers,” “talkers,” and “thinkers,” but I’ve found it’s best to have respect for each other, and combine our strengths.
> There’s a lot of looking down of noses, between “doers,” “talkers,” and “thinkers,” but I’ve found it’s best to have respect for each other, and combine our strengths.
Nicely said. While “those who can, do; those who can’t teach” is funny, it’s usually so, so wrong.
>While “those who can, do; those who can’t teach” is funny, it’s usually so, so wrong.
Right? I have found that teaching is a skill like anything else and is usually orthogonal to whatever skill is under discussion. It'd be like saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, bake."
I think a more useful saying would be "Don't assume that just because someone can DO it, that they can TEACH it." i.e. Engineering professors :-(
> I think a more useful saying would be "Don't assume that just because someone can DO it, that they can TEACH it." i.e. Engineering professors :-(
The best teachers that I've had, were trained as teachers. They knew the material, but weren't application experts.
The worst teachers that I've had, were content experts. I remember this Calc II teacher, who was a genius, but had no patience at all, for people that weren't on his level (we call those people "students"). I generally ask a lot of questions; sometimes, ones that seem obvious. I end up learning the material very well, but the process can be a bit messy (and embarrassing). This guy would abuse people that asked questions.
I got an incomplete, that semester. I was on the Dean's List, all the others.
I know a lot of guys who love fishing and can't seem to understand why I don't. When I was younger, I geared up and fished quite a bit. Once I became successful at the sport I began to realize I wasn't having as much fun as everybody was telling me I should have been having because I was actually catching fish.
Then it dawned on me, what joy I initially had when I started fishing had run it's course. So, I moved on and was relieved of almost forcing myself to have fun at fishing. My hobby thrill now is computers and electronics. After many years I still am having fun and don't see any changes in future, but who knows?
Maybe it's because I was never very good at it (I went perhaps a dozen times) but that's why I enjoyed fly fishing.
The fun for me was picking some place in the river (theoretically one that I thought might contain a fish) and trying to get the fly there. That was tricky enough for me to provide a lazy days entertainment. I might even catch a fish.
Totally resonate with this. I'm still in love with fishing, but it's like once you've caught a 10lbs bass, bass fishing doesn't feel that interesting anymore. It's weird but fair to think that one day I may no longer enjoy fishing.
This is the same for me. I have realised that once I begin drifting into the gear + talking parts of a hobby, my interest in the doing parts of the hobby are waning, and I'll probably stop enjoying it shortly. I can either take a break, or continue pursuing the novelty of the hobby through acquisition of the gear; but this is actually a very stressful way to interact with a hobby.
It's a cycle though and after a break I come back to enjoying the doing parts. I have a bunch of hobbies that circle around in various levels of "doing decay".
this is me but for magic the gathering and dungeons and dragons. it used to be fun but now it is not. and i sat wondering why it wasn't fun for years until i decided i don't even need to know WHY i just needed to accept that it was true and find other things to do.
I feel like this is me spinning in circles deciding on “the best language” to use for a side project, never committing, and then inevitably losing momentum.
Frameworks and languages are a software engineer’s “kit”, I guess?
I think so, but even things like focusing too much on a perfect design or well-tested system can bog you down on a side project if you actually want to finish it.
I know for me I used to spend way too much time trying to organize my code and folders just right. If I learned a new design technique, I'd incorporate it into the project. I was obsessed with doing things right, which I think is fine if my goal was to learn, which it partly was. However, I also wanted to ship!
Over time I relaxed my requirements on perfect design and testing and was able to ship things.
I agree with this 100%, every time i've wanted to get into a new tech stack I start a new side project more-or-less as a thinly veiled reason to learn it and hit my head on real world roadblocks within it. If nothing else you can learn beforehand that you'd never want to use it as a daily driver and drift on to the next big thing.
This is the way. A combination of the two would be prototyping in the language you know best (b), and then once you have it working rewriting it in (a). That way you’re only dealing with one novel thing at a time.
For me that’s Python (b) and any shiny object (a), respectively.
This is why you should about companies touting their choice of an exotic language as a perk. Rather than hiring people who want to build a product, they hire people who bikeshed language debates.
There's two main groups on hacker news. The people who think Go and Java are the only reasonable languages, and the people who think Rust and TypeScript are the only reasonable languages.
You'd think so, but from what I've seen, the overlap between enjoyers of Go and Java is tiny. The languages may occupy the same niche, but their design philosophies are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
When I was a kid, I was super into programming languages. Read all about the different kinds, learned about Haskell, self-modifying code, dependent typing, and of course I wanted to design my own language. Now I just want whatever breaks the least and let’s me get the job done.
It’s funny because my family always used to ask why I went into engineering instead of computer science, and I said it was because as soon as programming became a job, it would suck the fun out of it. Well I veered away from engineering into data science, and sure enough, I don’t seem to get quite the same joy out of coding that I did when I was younger.
Now that I think about it I get zero pleasure from buying cycling gear. The best bike is one that is light and functional enough that it kind of disappears out from under me and I don’t have to think about it, just enjoy the scenery. So I’m all about doing the thing.
On the otherhand I love tinkering with motorcycles. Not buying gear so much but researching and restoring them in my shop. Maybe its that engines are so much more technical or maybe its the slight spectre of death or serious bodily injury that keeps me from enjoying riding them as much. But I always feel a little disappointed when its all fixed and back together.
When you present a four square quadrant to measure something in terms of two values (axes), with two categorical values like this, I’d like to request you do it the same as every successful management consultancy and pitch deck in existence: the aspirational/better/best quadrant needs to be top right, not top left.
I looked at this and immediately squinted, because it looked like doing the gear was the thing we should all be aiming for. Switch hobby and gear and talk about how to move activities up and to the right and it makes more intuitive sense.
Yes, I realise the irony of discussing the gear of an article that’s trying to encourage us to do the thing, but trust me, this will make it so much better :-)
Who says any of the quadrants is aspirational? The author presents them as equally worthy, and why not? They're hobbies, not work. The whole point is to do what you enjoy. No need to feel bad for having a "bad" hobby.
Insightful post. Maybe I’m burnt out, but I was kind of sad to see the pivot to “how to be a better worker” at the end of it.
For me, when it comes to hobbies the it’s pretty sequential. I usually start with discussing, then start doing/gearing while discussing, then abandon the discussing and forget most of what I learned about gear, but usually keep doing.
I spent a few months reading about bicycle sizing and components and geometries and etc., and got a lot of joy from all of that. Then at some point I got a bicycle, and now it’s like 7 years later and I barely remember anything from that first phase, but I still ride the bicycle.
Same with wristwatches, mycology, etc. I always open with the obsession/discussion phase before moving on to a more settled doing phase.
That's how I see it, too. There's a gear-and-discussion phase in many hobbies, which is important to start to understand the field. But once you acquired the necessary basics, you'll start drifting into the doing. And that's really how it should be.
(As a semi-unrelated side note, I often see people looking down on certain quadrants. But to me, any hobby is fine so long as it doesn't hurt anyone while giving the practitioner joy.)
Definitely true for me with my most recently acquired hobby of fishing, although I lean extremely heavily towards doing the thing. I had some experience from childhood but I first started "bass fishing" as a hobby last summer with a $20 Walmart rod combo. I watched plenty of YouTube and engaged in the time honored pasttime of filling a box with a bunch of plastic critters of questionable usefulness. After doing that for a a good chunk of the summer, I spent about $100 on a nicer rod and reel, and figured out the 3 or 4 lures I like to throw, and now I just do that about 95% of the time I fish.
Same way with my guitar - bought pedals, gear, etc for years in high school. Now I have one main guitar and play my amp on the same setting almost every time I play.
Also same deal with all my programming setup shit, I did vim/tmux, played with emacs, and now I almost always just use VSCode.
I guess my archetype is that I like to tinker and fuck around, but once I settle in to something that works for me, I largely lose interest in that, and just do whatever makes for the lowest friction to do the actual thing.
Last year, we probably spent 60 hours working improvements and noncritical fixes, 100 hours on discussions and watching videos, and about 6 hours sailing.
On the road right now on the way back from Charleston Race Week.
30 hours of driving. 20 hours in the boatyard rigging and derigging. 2 hours each day getting the boat ready and packing/rigging things. We did 10 races total, each about 40 mins.
There’s an immense satisfaction moving a large complex object a long distance. Building it, using it, taking it apart, and moving it back once again.
To be fair there is a lot of maintenance involved with owning a boat in general. Whether moored or trailered things will rot/degrade but alas yes it's classic
edit: about to head to the marina to take care of some stuff at night lol, it's "clean the carb" time
My buddy is a bit of a perfectionist, so is always trying to resolve perceived shortcomings in various systems. And if we were doing a trans-oceanic race, that fixation on performance and safety would be worthwhile. But we are doing coastal pleasure sailing, so a lot of his optimizations are overkill.
IMO, 10:1 is a terrible "maintenance versus enjoyment hours" ratio.
Learning bass guitar over the past two years I've seen this. There are definitely GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) people who just buy more guitars and love to show them off and talk about gear in general.
I like how this points out that that's a valid hobby -- they're collectors.
But there's also memes that show up every once in a while that say, "You'd be a better musician if you just got off social media and practiced!". People who discuss like these as much as players!
For efficiency, I took up machining, where "Doing" and "Gear" have had a cosmic "merge cells" command applied to them. The only reason to own machining equipment is to USE it... to create tools and fixtures to improve your machining equipment.
Yes, so many people who write for magazines seem to use their tools to make more tools.
I wish I had some of that in me. I resent every second working on my machines as opposed to using them to make stuff. Which would be why none of them work very well :-\
I wish I was rich enough to pay someone to 'just come and set them all up properly and check on them every couple of months!'
My actual hobby is model engineering focused on locos. Like sailing, it's 90% maintenance & 10% doing. Unfortunately, it's the doing I prefer.
Definitely a tough frame of mind to be in for metalwork. You remind me that loco-builders are the exception to my rule, though. Maybe clock makers too, but the rest of us are busy on our solid toolposts and NASA-engineered toolbit height gauges.
i love the framing introduction to this post that is something relatively quotidian but then loops back to something dev career related.
> If each person has a finite amount of time to spend either learning or sharing, we'd expect to find a negative correlation between output and experience. This, in turn, lowers the overall quality of content on any given subject
my counter would be that this is a U shaped curve, not a linear correlation. some reflection is good - you only know something when you can teach it, you dont know what you think until you force yourself to write things down, you learn faster when there are many people to correct you instead of having to personally experience everything first hand, etc - but there's some crossover where you're left not doing enough to support the amount of talking you've committed to doing. (this is related to the general study of optimal overhead, which i've tried to gather https://www.swyx.io/optimal-overhead)
I've noticed this effect when learning to play a game. In order to improve, one must practice a skill, but one cannot do so if they don't have an idea of what a better way to execute that skill is. Therefore, a certain amount of theorizing is required, otherwise one ends up just mindlessly playing and their skill stagnates.
This is part of why some people with 10 years of experience actually only have 1 year of experience, repeated 10 times.
The converse is also true of course, if all one does is theorize without practicing, then not only is the theory not being worked into a skill, but at some point the theorizing will be based only on prior theorizing instead of experience, which invariably results in incorrect theories.
The optimal loop seems to be:
1. Pick a desired skill to improve at
2. Analyze the way you're doing it right now and figure out a better way. This is the trickiest step, if unable to self-analyze look for guidance in others.
3. Consciously practice, one skill at a time
This applies to every skill in existence, not just games.
I notice this with YouTube personalities. It takes a lot of effort to run a high quality YouTube channel, and you often see people stop being competitive in their sports and start being youtubers instead. Some of the most well compensated sports people aren't even competing, they just teach on YouTube.
The only sporty YouTubers I follow are in parkour and World Chase Tag. Most of those are demonstrating their own skills, so they do have to be good at what they do. Some are among the best in the world at what they do. Only one (JimmyTheGiant) is mostly commenting and interviewing (and making brief documentaries about the history of the sport), and he's open that he's not the best at the actual parkour.
I suppose it depends on the field. A retired athlete probably still has a lot of useful things to say about their sport, whereas other fields really require you to stay up to date to be useful.
I've played guitar for something like 25 years, and have been active on forums for the same time. I've oscillated between "collecting gear" and "playing guitar" many, many times - not that those are mutually exclusive, at all, but it I feel that it is such a ubiquitous thing in that space, that most everyone that play guitar seriously have found themselves in the same position.
Suddenly you find yourself with too much gear, and you've spent too much time just buying stuff, without putting equal effort into your playing / writing / etc.
Then you speak with the guys that are actually out there playing, and get a refresher to pick up your damn guitar and just play, gear be damned. So you feel very motivated for months...years...and then you're suddenly back collecting stuff, or spending too much time reading about the stuff.
And to be honest, it kind of reminds me of when I started coding. Back then, I had a compiler, a bare-bones text editor, and that was that. I was really productive, creative even. Then I got caught up in the world of tooling, and I spent more time on building my perfect setup, rather than building products. (as much as I'd want to, at least).
I'd say the author nailed it, although in the era of youtube, he probably should have said a bit about how "talking about" the hobby or the kit becomes for many, watching other people talk about it. Avocations like woodturning and model engine buildin, e.g., have become spectator hobbies for innumerable people who may or may not ever own any real kit, but who become armchair experts in the craft anyway.
Personally, I'm squarely in the "doing it" quadrant for things that involve actual physical activity (woodworking, fruit growing, gardening). I have tried innumerable times to become interested in forums on these topics, and online or in-person, talking about them is of only minor interest to me. And while, I fantasize a bit about the kit involved, I am far more likely to make-do with used equipment, or build my own, than go all-in on kit.
Interesting framework. My 2c is that some hobbies are harder to do (top left corner) than others. Many listed in the article, eg, hiking, photography, climbing, etc: you can’t just do it always. I find I enjoy making music at home since I can just sit down for any amount of minutes and engage.
Making music is one where the gear is a huge part of it. I have some electronic music making gear (midi keyboard, drum computer and a synth), but I like tinkering with the gear and fiddling more than actually making music, lol.
It doesn't have to be. You can make music very simply. You can record on your phone. It doesn't have to be all the tracks and gear.
I have a friend who has searched his whole life for tone. Top end guitars, amps, more pedals than anyone I have ever seen. His actual guitar playing? Less complete, however, he loves it. Do what does it for you, in the way you like it. That is the best part of hobbies to me.
Yeah I enjoy that part also :) But it certainly feels like you also just need some of the gear (eg keyboard), whereas maybe with photography you could use the phone to start?
I went down a YouTube rabbit hole recently, watching people make music on the fly with GarageBand on their phone. There are some fantastically talented people out there.
I've had to be deliberate about what I do with embedded programming.
I sat down to introspect, and realised that I was:
- learning the inner workings of various electronics
- learning #![no_std] Rust
- learning about software standards like Matter
- doing projects that I never complete
- reading, discussing, watching
From the 4 quadrants, I don't think I was doing enough of the first, being to produce DIY devices that I can use around the house.
It was only when I deliberately decided to focus on the first, that I was able to tame my time spent on the other 3 quadrants.
That has sometimes meant accepting that I should use things like ESPHome, build my firmware/software in C and C++, etc.
Else my expertise will forever be theoretical, not the reason why I got into embedded development in the first place.
Some hobbies are much harder to do than others. For those, the doing will be a lot less than the discussing. Examples, scuba but don't live close to water, flying, but can't afford to do it frequently, etc.
Also, the ability to "do" a hobby might vary over time, depending on many factors. Some are season-related, others might depend on personal life or even health. This might shift the hobby execution between the quadrants.
The author misses the concept of passion I think. It’s a major assumption that everyone has the same amount of time to discuss and or do, and I think it’s an incorrect/useless assumption.
There are certainly people who talk about hobbies more than actually doing them (it felt like this article was targeted negatively towards these folks), but often the biggest doers are also the biggest discussers.
I've always had trouble finding community in some groups that are so focused on gear. I rarely know enough about gear to carry on a conversation for more than a few minutes, and even if I did I'd be soooo remarkably bored. I’m the kind of person who puts on an ordinary pair of beat-up old shoes past their reasonably serviceable limit and goes on a hike over terrain that really should require spikes.. (shrug)
This "gear as a hobby" carries over to computers too. People who get into custom keyboards, tweaking every detail of their work setup, nerding out about an extra X or Y on some machine. Rarely do these excitements seem to align with important engineering constraints. But it's a collecting/gear hobby. Hmmm, interesting..
Personally, I am firmly in all 4 quadrants of the graph :)
My main hobby is photography. From the minimum viable gear perspective, I had "enough" many years ago. I like taking photos a lot, but I also like the gear perspective. New gear - mostly new lenses - often enough give new angles and inspiration. And I like to discuss gear and techniques. That also contributes to my abilities and also just can be fun, as I am like probably most HN readers quite interested in technology.
Also, at different times in the year and different life situations, the one or the other part of the hobby is more feasible, so it is very nice to be able to follow the same hobby under different circumstances.
Interesting article. The four quadrants are inspiring. I have thought about this many times, but not as clearly as this.
And I associated it with MBTI. Maybe the different MBTI type seem to be naturally more interested in one of the quadrants. For example, an ESFP would be more expressive, and an ISTP would be more obsessed with equipment and tools. I'm curious if it's these natural differences in personality that cause people to split into four quadrants when come to a hobby? If so, then such a split is inevitable and indiscriminate. Of course, the MBTI is not a perfect science. I'm just use it to help me understand some of the diversity in human personality.
The 2nd diagram, under the heading "Appearance of Expertise", shows a negative correlation between expertise doing the hobby versus discussing the gear.
Counterpoint:
"Jean Renoir once told us that when his father's friends used to come to the house — all the distinguished French painters of the time — they never talked about grand theories of painting; they talked about where to get the best turpentine"
This article summarizes a feeling I’ve had such a hard time articulating.
At many of my previous jobs, I was so frustrated by the people obsessed with tooling instead of doing the work. Like, why are you trying to develop a react application in VIM after you spent months evangelizing VScode to me?? Who cares, ship the thing!
Of course, these were the most visible people to upper management, and the darlings of our department. :/ Meanwhile I was the one staying on task, making sure things got out on time. Lesson learned: be loud. Advertise your accomplishments and advocate for yourself if you’re a do-er.
FPV drones are a super interesting extreme example for this. If you want to be in the top left quadrant, you only have two options:
1. Also be in the top right quadrant and probably spend more time on gear than actually flying.
2. Have a shit-ton of spending money for replacement drones.
I have a friend who chose number 1, but ended up being burned out by the constant tinkering and not being able to fly that he gave up his bigger FPV drone. He's still into the hobby, but restricting himself to smaller, easier to maintain drones.
I'm firmly in the 'gear' quadrant of beer brewing. I build a really cool automatic brewery (wrote my own software, welded a 3 tier frame, had a stainless insulated mash tun welded for me (my welding skills are not good enough for that)). All I have to do is add the grains and hops and suck the wort out with a march pump at the end. Everything else is automatic.
I haven't used it in 4 years. I think I just enjoyed building it more than I enjoy using it.
On the hobby/gear distinction, I once heard a great interview with Sir Paul McCartney (of Beatles fame). He talked about how someone once asked him what brand of electric guitar strings he used - apparently a point of great debate among the gear nerds in the music business - and he replied "I don't know, silvery looking ones?" or something like that. It blew some minds.
For people with nine hours to spare and an interest in this kind of thing, the Get Back documentary is incredible.
Five minutes of discussing the space, setup etc. Tea break. Hour of playing random riffs and scribbling on bits of paper. Desultory not-quite-argument between John and Paul. Bored Ringo. Friendly banter. Slightly less friendly banter. Then, after hours of faffing around, suddenly there's a reluctant agreement to get back to work - and everyone launches into one of the hits they're supposed to be recording, and suddenly it's the Beatles at their peak.
The last section on "Communication and Competence" i think becomes most important with experience and age. This also dovetails nicely into "The Athlete" vs. "The Coach" dichotomy embodied in the same person.
Collectible hobbies like Warhammer and Magic the Gathering are interesting in that regard, in that... nobody really cares if you only do it for the collecting, painting, making money off of it or playing the actual games.
Abstract vs Concrete is not a new observation, how many times have job interviews been decried because they optimise for abstract ability (discussing the job) and less so for the concrete ability (the ability to do the job).
I think another boat to consider are those who consume more than they produce. 'Doing' and 'discussing' are both 'producing' activities but much more demanding than absorbing content.
I almost accidentally described woodworking as a hobby of mine recently; I realised just in time that I basically only (so far?) watch other people do it on Youtube. (Not counting fixing/altering things slightly in a more DIY/carpentry-at-a-push sense than woodworking/joinery.)
This is much less an obstacle to enjoying a hobby than it is to enjoying a community associated with the hobby. I tend to be a loner in my hobbies, and can happily pursue them any way I please.
I discerned a similar ontology as the OP over the years in different hobbies too. My sense is that what quadrant one leans into can change in time and space too. In my case, I've had a whole heap of nerd hobbies in my life, among them being game collecting and retrogaming.
I was a game collector even when I was a child back in the heyday of console generations 4 and 5 all the way into my mid twenties, and also a game player since then up to the present as well. When I was much younger I used to love collecting original hardware and media complete in box and everything, and I kept everything I got when it was new in absolutely pristine condition (I was a very atypical child) but as I got older I grew tired of the collecting aspect of video games and sold everything off. At some point it dawned on me I was just buying stuff and putting it in a box (falling into the kit quadrant) and not really playing the games at all. After realizing all that, and when I had acquired everything I wanted (I tended to collect a mix of only games I liked + genre instead of by system, so my collecting requirements were much smaller and easier to achieve), the fun was over and I cashed out some years later. With retrogaming I now vastly prefer a Raspberry Pi and a gamepad in the living room. Fortunately I was able to get in and get out of the game collecting hobby when it was a fairly cheap hobby to participate in (i.e. when CIB copies of classic games were like tens of dollars at most).
I was also an avid tabletop gamer who was into the playing and collecting aspect of Magic: The Gathering and other TCGs, particularly Legend of the Five Rings, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, and VS System. I started playing MTG way back in the ancient days and had a particular taste for vintage. I also played standard, booster draft, legacy, and extended, but vintage was always my favorite. Back then vintage was accessible on a high school budget with planning and dedication, and wasn't the rich man's game it now, at least if one is not using proxies. For a long time I was both into the competitive side of the game, as well as the collecting side of the game. Over time I grew tired of the playing aspect of Magic: The Gathering and vastly preferred the collecting aspect of it, before life priorities changed entirely and I lost interest in TCGs completely.
I don't really do the collecting/kit hounding side of any hobbies anymore, I prefer the actual doing of the thing instead, but I am grateful I was able to get in, enjoy it fully, and get out of the collecting aspect of both video games and MTG long before both became impossibly expensive to participate in, though it is fun to dip in and see what is going on with those things from time to time.
Not stated in the article, but I suspect that another big reason a lot of hobbyists obsess over the gear and kit aspect of a hobby is because buying kit is a substitute for not having time or energy to actually do the hobby itself. In some sense, buying kit is materializing fantasies about actually doing the thing, but not having the time or the place to do it.
Promising premise immediately deflated by the four-square (and then the paragraphoid to over-explain the four-square).
Fine, let's scan over text because the four-square was over-explained. Groan, "Kit heads" -- that's the agon in this essay? Creators vs. consumers, artists vs. amateurs...or something else?
>> Kit heads will often say (or imply) that having the best kit leads to the best performance. That doesn't seem true. I couldn't ski the Lhotse Couloir even on the best gear ever made.
Did he really take this path to get to the "a good musician can play nice music well on a crappy instrument" insight, even if he doesn't quite reach the shore? Really, he made it only to "violinist holding Stradivarius isn't necessarily virtuoso". Never-the-less, I guess it was wrapped in a fit-for-consumption-by-management homily. Crappy kit for all!
>> I believe that one of the most important things an engineer or technical leader can do for their career is to practice, and develop, strong communication skills. It may seem like this belief is at odds with the point of this post.
Not in the way you think, friend. There is a stark difference between actually having an idea and expressing it well. It is quite another thing entirely for an engineer to sort out the muddled thinking of others (a daily job hazard). But I applaud the attempt, especially because I've been so critical. An essay!
[edit: you philistines! or give a cogent rebuttal!]
You’re rude, which is why people aren’t responding.
Marc is a well respected engineer who has worked on multiple foundational services at AWS and probably doesn’t want to go on the record saying he’s sick of rust fans, so he made the essay nominally about photography.
This essay is saying, “Fuck rust. We used java to build S3, DynamoDB, ec2 and everything else the internet runs on. Kitheads, please stop joining aws and asking if you can rewrite in rust. Learn the fundamentals of distributed systems and apply them to customer problems, and the kit won’t matter.”
Personally, I prefer to ride, therefore I take care to have near me nothing that can tempt me to overhaul. When anything happens to my machine I wheel it to the nearest repairing shop. If I am too far from the town or village to walk, I sit by the roadside and wait till a cart comes along.
My chief danger, I always find, is from the wandering overhauler. The sight of a broken-down machine is to the overhauler as a wayside corpse to a crow; he swoops down upon it with a friendly yell of triumph. At first I used to try politeness. I would say: “It is nothing; don’t you trouble. You ride on, and enjoy yourself, I beg it of you as a favour; please go away.”
Experience has taught me, however, that courtesy is of no use in such an extremity.
Now I say: “You go away and leave the thing alone, or I will knock your silly head off.”
“three men on the bummel”, 1914