Consider Knitting

I’m both an amateur musician and a professional coder.

Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)

But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.

There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.

That’s my take anyway.

it's not about producing tangible stuff, it's about working with physical materials and getting tangible feedback from the interactions between your body and the stuff you're working with. working with a computer didn't have that physical feedback loop.

tiniuclx answered this very eloquently in a separate comment¹ so I’ll quote them in full:

> The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.

Currently, I’m trying to learn how to improve my dynamic range: being able to play softer and louder and/or accent a particular beat while keep a steady rhythm. I found it hard not to strike the strings more quickly to make them sound louder and I still find it challenging to play evenly with consistent loudness and tone.

I’ve found the more I play, the more attuned I become to the subtleties of the sound being produced, e.g., I’ve learned that pressing down on a string too much results in the pitch being sharper than what it should be. I’ve been experimenting with different thicknesses of plectrums and if not using a plectrum, noticing how the tone is different depending on whether the string is struck with the nail or the fleshy part of the finger. That’s all on an acoustic guitar; so far, I’ve purposely avoided the rabbit-hole of how electric guitar tone can be modified by amplifier and effects.

Programming – for me – doesn’t really have the same nuances and challenges. Even though I don’t produce anything tangible, I guess the main benefit for me is that learning and playing the guitar exercises completely different parts of my brain than those I use as a system administrator or programmer. I’m completely focussed on what I’m doing when I’m learning and practising and there’s a real buzz from nailing something that I first thought was impossible.

As a side-effect, it has also improved my appreciation for different styles of music and my understanding of how music is made (e.g., I can tell the difference between music in 4:4 and 6:8 time signatures) and what other instruments are doing in a piece of music, e.g., drummers often play the snare on beats 2 and 4 in many genres of popular music.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44178391

I think with guitar it is easy to enter flow state because it is easy to avoid playing the "wrong" notes. Probably similar to these other hobbies. Perhaps they just happen to have a tactile component, although it is nice to do something a little different from time to time. It seems computer games probably provide a similar form of satisfaction.

The other answers describe the process well but here’s my personal perspective on how I got into it:

When cycling off-road, wheel rims would regularly go out of shape so I purchased spoke spanners to correct the side-to-side wobble by adjusting the spoke tension. This was important as back in the 90s as almost all non-professional mountain bikes used some form of rim brake: cantilever, and later, V-brakes. I would fix the wheels by removing the tyre and tube and mounting the wheel in the forks (front wheel) or wheel stays (rear wheel) so I could see where the wobbles were.

I eventually realised that the rims also needed to be trued radially, i.e., the rim forms a perfect circle and is consistently equidistant from the flanges of the hub. I was doing this often enough that I ended up buying a proper truing stand and I became the go-to guy for fixing wheels for friends.

Given enough abuse from mountain-biking, eventually wheels can no longer be trued by adjusting spoke tension. It seemed a shame – and environmentally wrong – to discard a wheel when it had a good-quality hub so I graduated to buying new spokes and rims to build on to the old hub (which would usually last for years) using the instructions from Sheldon Brown (as linked to in a sibling comment).

The process of building a wheel requires an understanding of the physical forces acting on the spokes and rim but the practice is more like an art. The more you did it, the better you got at avoiding issues like residual twist. It’s a bit like tuning a stringed instrument. I would even pluck the spokes and compare the pitch to get a feel for the amount of tension the individual spoke was under. It was very satisfying to get a consistent tone.

Wheelbuilding in this case uses "building" to convey the measurement and adjustment required to assemble parts of the wheel. Building from parts, not from scratch materials.

https://sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

Putting a rim, hub (possibly in parts) and spokes together is (rightfully) called “wheel building” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelbuilding).

I guess that’s what they did.

I've never suffered from anxiety nor depression, and yet can't focus on more than one thing at a time. I can't imagine coding while watching tv or listening to an audio book. Nor would I want to!

If I tried doing two things at once, it'd be painful and also I wouldn't be doing either properly. I believe the "multitaskers" aren't that much better, they just learned to context-switch quickly. I'm not the least envious.

I do, but I'm not convinced there is correlation. In front of the computer I can easily multitask and I can just as easily sit for 10 hours straight and code with focus. Outside the digital realm I find it harder to multitask - if I talk to someone on the phone and try to do something at the same time I immediately lose focus on the conversation, I drift away and no longer know what the other person is talking about. I've been wondering if the difference is that there is external input which I can't anticipate - if I do multiple things on the the computer by myself all state exists in my head and it's just a matter of random read access. On the other hand, I also find it hard to cook and go back to the computer for "just one second", every other time I immediately forget that there is food on the stove. I'd say that my attention span has suffered since Covid and I find it generally harder to keep focus, for example when watching TV, but if the focus is there I can still hold it for a very long time, e.g. when programming.

I also don't multitask well, but I think it's a little more complex than just not doing more than one thing at a time. Different tasks seem to occupy different brain regions, and it's really that I can't allocate one region to multiple things.

I can listen to music while I program, but it can't be anything with lyrics because programming requires too much of my language center.

Knitting doesn't touch my language center, so I can listen to music with lyrics or an audiobook. But it's too visual for me to watch anything else while I do it.

> As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it

> She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing

Those combinations don't seem at all comparable.

Has nothing to do with anxiety or depression

Multitasking is just a "personality trait".. and predominantly women are more able to multitask than men. You should simply ask around and see the correlations. Some of the happiest people I know can't multitask at all

Both knitting and crochet are very difficult and frustrating at first. Harder, I think, than your first time picking up a guitar.

The initial hump is steep but fairly small. It took me about four or five tries before I could make stitches. Once I got over that initial challenge, it got a lot smoother. Since then, there have been continuous incremental challenges, but all fairly small.

I haven't gotten over the hump with crochet. I'm left-handed but knit right-handed because mirroring everything is very hard. The entire knitting world presumes right-handed knitting. However, I knit Continental style which uses both hands and engages the left hand a lot, so I don't find that it feels very "wrong".

However, with crochet, I don't think I could ever hold the hook with my right hand. But also mirroring everything while trying to learn is not easy.

My mom also knits while watching TV, and she is super fast. I think one secret ingredient is that she doesn't care about making mistakes. Tinier mistakes she just ignores (even if they are visible in the end [I don't like that, so that's something I try to avoid, which adds pressure and slows me down]) and she doesn't mind backtracking and re-doing several rows if she really fucks up.

Where did you hear knitting is easier? I was under the impression that crocheting is much easier.

I did have a purpose and it didn't help much in this regard, it only helped with keeping up the friendly pressure to actually finish them. But generally, your advice is good nonetheless.

I absolutely did it for fun and to learn something new, it just didn't feel like as much fun as I had anticipated to me personally. I want it to be fun and relaxing, there is some fun in it but it's not relaxing.

The first programmable computer, using punchcards, was a loom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

A dishcloth is a great place to start, and I've learned ~90% of my knitting from Norman. He's great.

I will caution you that cotton yarn is definitely not the easiest yarn to start with. It has very little stretch which makes it hard to keep good tension and form stitches. Not impossible, just sort of difficult.

It's very much like learning to play guitar starting with an acoustic compared to an electric. Everything is a little stiffer and requires a little more finger strength.

So if you feel like it's more difficult than you expected, it may partially be because of the yarn.

Agree on all accounts. I very much enjoy the limited woodworking I've done, but the logistics are much trickier than knitting.

I do find whittling to be an interesting middle point. Like knitting, you don't need a dedicated workshop. It doesn't take a lot of set up and tear down for a given session. You can fit the project and tools in a small space.

Of course, you're shedding wood chips the whole time, so you can't really whittle on the couch. And you sure as hell can't do it on an airplane. But you can do it when, say, camping with friends, or sitting on the back porch when it's nice out.

I'm trying out an alternative currently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodcut.

It is well suited for me because

- I like wood

- I like knives

- I'm into typography

- it doesn't require that much work space

I have only just started out but it feels nice indeed! A hindrance is that I am not very artistically gifted, but as long as I make it mostly for myself, I don't mind too much.

Depending on where you live, there might be workshops nearby where you can sign up to use shared spaces (along with shared tools).

They're also the kind of places where they have lessons where you can sign up, so if you're interested in both classes and a space to work, they're a great fit.

I have some advice!

I have this problem. I did three things. First, I joined a makerspace that had a woodshop. This seems like it should cure all your problems but it won't. There's limited storage, unpredictable tool availability, the motivational issues of driving to a new place to work, etc.

Second, I joined another makerspace out of town! Redundancy and the availability of friends in the area to work with helps. Plus, supporting makerspaces feels good and the cost is not much compared to other hobbies.

Finally, there are some very basic, not large tools that can get you through 90% of projects, including very nice looking bookshelves, desks, cabinets, etc:

* Circle saw + track guide for rip cuts

* Saw horses for adhoc tables

* Power drill (+ you'll want one for all kinds of useful things anyway)

* Nice drill bit set

* Pocket hole jig (saves you time and assembly space)

* Drill block (takes the place of a drill press in a pinch)

* Painting blankets to put stain / glue-ups on

All of the above can fit in a small area of a closet, available when motivation strikes. Far and away the biggest storage headache is wood, which you'll have to get creative about, but for restoration or even modification, you won't need much. And for smaller projects you'll probably use most of what you buy on the same day if you plan it out.

Upgrades (which a makerspace would provide anyway):

* If you have a little space (like a desktop), you can get a chop/miter saw which makes repeated precise cuts much easier

* A router + bit set (esp keyhole bit! This makes hanging this much easier)

* Shopvac for dust (+ shopvacs are super useful anyway)

That's really it. You can do almost all the projects you'd want with just those, from the living room, patio, backyard, driveway, garage, or a parking spot out front.

What I get from the makerspace is access to drill presses, router tables, and table saws. Table saws are a game changer and are the best way to level up your precision and cut accuracy, but require so much space that I could never justify it at home (and small portable table saws are not the same).

I'm definitely still learning, but the main lessons are that good wood ($), precise cuts, adding layers from trim / recessed boards, hiding screws, and tons of sanding will make anything look really, really nice.

EDIT: One last thing: You can easily practice woodworking fundamentals without space by making joints, practicing stain matching (try to get veneer plywood to match a stained board), or practicing right-angle, precise cuts.

100%. There’s quite a few things I’ve got now which would be thousands of dollars to have someone else make for me but cost very little to make myself. Just requiring a few weekends of work. Stuff that feels quite luxury to own.

after that comment i hope he gets his deck in order

That's a great idea, I took apart a sacrifical blahaj and created patterns from all the panels so I could make my own. They came out a little skrunkly though, I used fabric that was a lot stretchier than I expected