Stuff Made Here

https://www.reddit.com/user/swighton/

I used to think that explaining engineering concepts was going to be very hard and boring. But seeing his videos and how well he did his animations really inspired me to try harder to explain concepts in a super interesting way.

Ideas / Concepts I learned from him

• Integration Hell
• Running out of things that go wrong If you try to test every single hypothesis, you will eventually run out of things that will go wrong.

“this is painful, but eventually run out of things that can go wrong” (9:20) from here

If you try everything, then at some point you run out of things that will potentially go wrong.

• if you face new things that you don’t know in a field, at some point you will run out of terms that you are unfamiliar with. And then you can really innovate. And then become faster at doing. Like right now, it takes me forever to do one thing.

Reddit Comments / Insight

Glad you like my projects! Before giving any recommendations I would give a meta-recommendation: figure out what your end goal is 5-15 years from now. What would you like to be doing and what would you like to have accomplished? Having this defined is a incredibly useful tool to test decisions against. For example does a masters in robots move you towards that? If so is it the highest ROI use of that time to achieve your goal(s)?

With that out of the way I’ll tell you my experience which is of course totally specific to me and my goals. My goal has been to be able to develop new things / products from the ground up. I also had the specific goal of developing some kind of high impact device that people really like (I arguably achieved that, being responsible for the Form 3). To achieve those long term goals I identified the following as key:

1. Engineering breadth (mechanical, electrical)
2. Scientific understanding (physics, materials, chemistry)
3. Software competence (critical part of creating modern things)
4. Fabrication competence. (even if I’m not making it myself, knowing how its made give me a huge advantage. Also I love fabricating)

In college I did ME, EE, CS. I focused on precision metrology, machine design, robotics and computer graphics. In terms of specific languages, tools, and so on, those have mostly been a byproduct of the projects that I choose to do. For example I learned OpenCL for a program that would be way too slow otherwise. I try to choose projects that make me learn something new so that I’m always building up new skills / understanding of tools. Although I spend time reading and learning I find that projects are a the most useful way to learn things. I find them really fun and it gives me a good reward for getting over the learning hump (a satisfying result).

Learning new skills for projects and breaking a habit of incomplete projects

https://www.reddit.com/r/StuffMadeHereOfficial/comments/mw1hak/learning_new_skills_for_projects_and_breaking_a/

Good question! I should preface by saying that I only have my own experience to go by so some things that I recommend may not be one size fits all solutions.

The reason that I recommend working through textbooks is that textbooks tend to be vastly superior to other sources of information (especially compared to the internet). The reason I think this is true is that a textbook is written over a long span of time (years) with the overall goal of building your knowledge of a subject in systematic and coherent way. Compare a good linear algebra textbook to random blog posts on the internet. They are in totally different leagues. I think this comes down to how expensive and time consuming a textbook is versus a free blog post.

I start with something that I want to get better at - for example chemistry. I will research what the very best textbook is and then spend 30-60 minutes a day reading and working examples. I don’t do all the examples, just enough for me to feel like I understand the material. I also will not usually go cover to cover I’ll stop and come back later.

You mentioned recall - I can’t recall anything if I don’t work the examples. I’m also not cramming it which means I’m sleeping on a bite-sized chunk of information which I’ve found to be very important for absorbing and learning stuff. I also think about what I learned and try to visualize the concepts and make inferences from it. I take notes but don’t review them all that often other than when working exercises. For me notes mostly make me go slow and think about the information. I also sleep enough :)

The way I deal with perfectionism and tangents is that I don’t put any time into things that don’t advance my overall goal. For example I might do a project because I want the final product and because I want to learn a particular thing. If I want to do something that doesn’t advance those two goals - for example building an enclosure for the device - I don’t make it. If there’s a little problem that doesn’t matter I just ignore it. The net effect