[gonehome]

Thanks for sharing my blog post! :)

I think something I would have included that I thought about later is being curiosity driven. It's more personal, but I've found a lot of what I've really enjoyed (and where I've learned the most) has been from allowing myself to go down random rabbit holes to play with different things.

There's some risk to this if you never go deep enough, but I think the benefits are worth it.

I think there's also something to PG's essay about liking debugging specifically too.

[Robelius]

Reading your blog post brought back memories. The first Hacker News article that got me to make an account was How To Become A Hacker[1]. That led me down a rabbit hole as a high schooler that got me into software and later hardware. There's definitely a direct line from me reading that article to me becoming a hardware engineer.

I hope your article helps create the same effect on an unknowing high schooler. Thanks for putting it out there!

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#nerd_connect...

[gonehome]

Thanks! There's a pretty direct line for me too. I'd be happy if my post helps others in a similar position.

[eliasbagley]

Very similar for me - there is also a direct line from me reading that article to me being a software engineer today.

[croh]

Thanks for putting this down. I too have sweet memories of original article. After reading ESR article, I chose Python over Perl few years back, and kick off my career. But the most important thing article taught me is about hacker mindset.