Abstractions upon abstractions – recovering the joy of learning and exploring

As with probably every other developer around the world, I’ve felt a strong impact of AI in my daily life and work. I can’t really judge it as being only good or only bad. There’s always a bit of both.

I barely touch code anymore, except for the occasional fix or tweak. The last time I manually coded something was probably 10 months ago. The joy of coding is gone. Does manual coding have a future? Some people will argue for yes and some for no. I believe I’m more inclined to say no. But I recognise I might also be biased by the fact that I have been doing this for some decades now, and eventually you also get tired of doing the same stuff. The reality is that 90% of us are not working on anything super interesting or challenging (code-wise), but just rebuilding the same things in a different way.

I think this tiredness (if we can call it that), aligned with a lack of doing things in the real physical world, pushed me to recover an old hobby of mine: electronics. When I was young, I always wanted to work with electronics and robots. Whenever I got a toy, I would play with it for a couple of days, and then I would rather open it up and take it apart, wondering what all those small components were used for. As I grew up, computers and programming took over, and I left electronics by the wayside.

Right now I’m trying to learn things from scratch. Not jumping to Arduinos or Raspberry Pis, but staying in the analog world for a bit. Learning about resistors, capacitors, inductors, revisiting formulas I learnt in school, and trying things for myself to understand how they actually work.

It’s been incredibly refreshing and entertaining. I haven’t felt so lost, so dumb, in quite a while. I actually enjoy feeling stupid at not getting how a simple circuit works (or doesn’t work). It awakens a sense of curiosity that I haven’t felt in a long time — perhaps the last time being when I was first exploring programming.

Then I tried to re-create an AND and an OR logic gate, using simple components. Learning the actual implementation of what built modern computing. I can’t describe the feeling when my brain actually wired up the right neurons (pun intended!) and I finally got how everything was working together. Next came the 555 timer and its multitude of use cases. Calculating capacitor and resistor values to create the right timing to make an LED blink… until you get to passive buzzers: tune the frequency of the timer again and you have FREAKING SOUND WAVES being created!

An old MIT course I found had an amazing introduction to electronics. The teacher was explaining how we, as humanity, went from understanding and measuring nature to gradually abstracting away to more and more complex systems, up to launching rockets or playing video games. It was so fascinating that I asked AI to turn it into an image for me.

Even if we are the best in the world at something (like web development or OS programming), we often fail to grasp the huge amount of knowledge everything is built on. Abstractions upon abstractions. How often do we go down a level (or two) to understand how the things we use actually work?

Obviously, this isn’t required. But how fascinating it can be! I look at integrated circuit chips from the 1970s and I marvel at the ingenious minds that figured out how to accomplish complex logic, just by handling currents and voltage and redirecting electrons in a smart way!

Maybe I should be outside getting more sun, working in the garden… but I have to admit that this is giving me a very cool dose of “messing with the real world” that I was in need of.

Right now I’m back to that time when, as a kid, I took things apart. Looking around for broken machines, tearing them apart and salvaging components, analyzing how they work and trying to understand how to build things.

And in a few weeks (or months), perhaps I’ll be building more complex circuits, robots, plugging them into AI or cloud services. But at least the joy of discovering and learning something new was already worth it!