[onemiketwelve]

I learned to fix my car because I was a broke kid with a shitty corrola. I was learning programming at around the same time as when my car was having problems.

And honestly at the time the two felt kind of similar. Both were super scary, black boxes. But both were things that normal human beings learned to do. You didn't have to be some crazy genius. And a lot of times you really are debugging a car, except since it's physical, it's a lot more intuitive.

I once tallied up all the repairs vs what I would've paid mechanics and it came to 18k. Nowadays that's a price I can swallow and it no longer makes financial sense for me to do my own repairs.

But I now have a garage full of "free" tools and I can tell very confidently when mechanics bullshit me. But that happens less than just simply talking the lingo and having the mechanic appreciate that I know what's going on and can commiserate on how shitty a repair is gonna be.

I think most sw people can enjoy and go into the physical world. I think there's so many similarities and never understood certain people's reluctance or even badge of honor of being bad at working with physical stuff