[jimmies]

Stories like this totally make sense to me. Dreams are the most fearful force in our lives. A teacher needs to transfer inspirations to their students just as much as knowledge and experience. Experience can be gained by exposure, but inspirations can totally exist without much exposure. As a student, when you don't have inspirations then the lack of (or the existence thereof) practical exposure sucks, but many things were dreamed about for a long time before becoming a reality.

I didn't know what an actual computer was until I was 11. I am a millennial, only 30 now, but I was one of those people who only knew about the magical computers through my dad's stories and books. In the first 10 years of my life, I grew up poor as a church mouse in a rural area in Vietnam. To tell you how bad it was, I'm a male and only barely over 5ft and 100lbs now. My dad, who was a college lecturer, told us about him learning English and how to use MS-DOS on his 1.2MB floppy disk in the early 1990s -- it was mind-blowing to my 6-year-old brain. Everything you need is in this small package. If you want to delete something, just press a key instead of scratching it! If you want to issue any command, give it all it wants to know and press Enter!

I just had the first blip of making an impact by shipping a free software product that many people find useful which I first shared here. I am quite convinced that people don't just use that software because it is useful and functional to them. Compared to a $300 commercial product that has everything working correctly my free software project that uses $100 worth of hardware is a piece of buggy brahmin shit. People tried it because it gets them inspired. Shortly after I announced, it set up pictures of people trying and making awesome setups on the homepage. I also made a subreddit to share stories and ask questions, and a personal blog telling why and how I'm making progress and what I was really thinking when I made those decisions. I am still very much a real person that has opinions, dreams, and ideals. I haven't turned into an intelligent PR speech machine that says the empty words. That is something a company that sells those products can't deliver compared to a hipster dude living in a hole like me can. I am living in a dream as much as the adopters of my software.

I used to see a quote on a professor's office door when I was an undergrad that said: "People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel." I tried to keep that quote in mind whenever I have the opportunity to teach or bring something to someone.