[drzaiusapelord]

>Both working on a farm and programming are surprisingly creative professions.

For all the shit rural culture gets around here, I'm usually impressed by the ingenuity of its homegrown hacker-like culture. I sometimes get frustrated with my overly automated urban life. Apartment/condo living with a low maintenance car/appliances/technology and a worklife where I'm shuttled to and from via public transportation doesn't leave a lot of room for fun little hacks or impromptu solutions. The room that's left is often trivial gimmicks like tying something to tasker or messing around with whatever platform or language is hot right now.

Then I bought a fixer-upper house. As frustrating as this can be sometimes, there's just a great rewarding feeling of learning new things, fixing things, adding value to your home, etc. Real life hacking that isn't servos or screens is surprisingly rewarding. A small farm must be this x100.

[agentultra]

I bought a century-old house and have already learned tiling and simple plumbing jobs with ABS. It has already infected my brain so much that when I need a break I can go to my basement and flip on my wood lathe and make a new pen or something when I get frustrated. Then I can come back and solve my computing problem with a clear mind.

As much as I love programming sometimes it's play that's most important. You need to gather fresh ideas from the world around you. It can be isolating to be stuck in the rut of progress and innovation that is so endemic to our culture. Learning to fix, build, and create things that I depend on is worth investing in; even if it doing so isn't rational.

I could have simply called a contractor to re-tile my floor and they probably would have done it in less time and for less money than it cost me to take the time off work and do it myself. But I learned how to do it on my own. It hurt, it took a long time, I screwed up a bunch. But I walk on that floor everyday and my family loves it. It makes me proud and happy and I think I did a fairly good job. It'll last for decades. The code I wrote last week will probably not even compile in a decade.

[klibertp]

> there's just a great rewarding feeling of learning new things, fixing things,

You don't need to live anywhere special to do this. It's easy. Just fix it if something breaks. Try to make things instead of going out to buy them. It's not even always cheaper to do this, and the effects are certainly less polished than what you can buy (it gets better over time), but the feeling that you did something real is very worthwhile.

I'm living in a tiny apartment and I gathered some tools like this: http://www.dremel.com/en-us/Tools/Pages/ToolDetail.aspx?pid=... for working with small pieces of wood, leather, metal and glass. Good tools are very important, you don't want to be fighting with your tool when making something, it's frustrating. I made something like this: http://i00.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/2042435968_5/Electronic-C... out of an old leather belt, fixed a few bedside lamps and some flashlights and built a bedside table, among other things. It took me from one week to one month to make them, in contrast to going out and buying them in 30 minutes tops. But I learned many useful skills, and - in some instances - made things much better suited to my tastes than any mass produced equivalent.

It's like Linux or Mac OS thing: if you want your computer to just work, go with the latter, but if you want to decide yourself how most of your computer works you need Linux. Needless to say I'm using Linux wherever I can :)

[jakejake]

I've bought two fix-er-up houses now. I've always been pretty hands-on with building things. However as patient and diligent as I am building software, I found that I just didn't have the same mentality when it came to fixing my house. Breaking my back while trying to sand drywall seams on the ceiling was just utterly tedious to me and I found myself doing shoddy work. After finishing one room I realized that I just don't have it in me and hired out the rest of the work.

With software I just seem to have patience and enjoy getting every little detail right. So I feel like it's been the right path for me, I've never really felt any urge whatsoever to switch careers.

[bkjelden]

I recently moved from a rural/small city area to a major urban area.

One of the most striking differences to me has been how many more abstractions there are for people living in a city - and as a result, how much less those people know about their surroundings.

[br3w5]

And just not spending enough time in free outdoor spaces...and I'm not talking about contrived "urban spaces"