Don't underestimate the amount of knowledge you don't have to perfect things. I remember building scheduling software in PHP in high school, because I just fixed problem after problem, and I was not limited by any form of knowledge. If I'd have to do it again, I'd be perfecting the architecture, refactoring everything every other week...
There’s a real double-edged sword to this whole “becoming a ‘better’ software engineer” thing. I remember just hacking stuff together when I was younger with not a care for whether I was doing it right or not. I just wanted to make it work.
I miss that feeling. It doesn’t come around as often now, but I still feel like I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on years of online discourse about right and wrong ways to do things, and just… do them.
> I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on
While at it: the fastest way to move is free fall. If you fall at will and from a reasonable height, it's called a jump, and indeed gets you there fast. Otherwise it's called a crash, and it usually results in your limping the rest of the way.
So the approach of just hacking things together works great for small things, and the worse, the larger the scale grows.
The laptop in question, for instance, was definitely not just hacked together without any planning, even though the project seems to have fortunately escaped analysis paralysis.
tbqh, I vividly remember rolling my eyes in high school when older people would say: "don't squander the free time you have; you'll wish you had it back someday..." and while I don't outright regret doing kid stuff and squandering the free time in high school as kids do, some days those sentiments ring out more true than others; today being one of them after seeing this video.
Yeah I mean I wasn't doing things like this. I was constantly frustrated because I didn't have any resources to achieve the things I wanted. Didn't even have a half decent computer. I had some janky celeron thing that barely functioned and I couldn't even buy books about subjects I wanted to learn. To think the things I could have done if I was a well off kid.
Yeah, but TBF.. in my early teens, my "internet" consisted of a 300 baud modem hooked up to an Atari 800xl (my 2nd computer - the TI 99-4/A was "obsolete"), my "manual" was a 6502 assembly book I borrowed and typed out and a binder full of photocopied notes called "De Re Atari" that I picked up at a garage sale or something. My later teens, some of my time in was spent debugging early Watcom SQL software and working on an educational software app in FoxPro, as well as studying computer engineering (and still working on the side in FoxPro).
Yeah, that's a given. Everyone has only 24h of time per day. And everyone has different struggles.
This is an incredible achievement. And i really don't like, that your comment invited other people to jump onboard & comment in a way belittling the achievements– even if just implicitly, to make themselves feel better why a high-schooler is doing things like that.
If all that was really the main driver, HN frontpage should be flooded with projects made by high-schoolers. But it is not. It might be contributing factor.
Btw: Funnily enough, i would expect these type of excuses & self-comforting negativity from high-schoolers.
I'm not saying this in a negative way - but priorities shift in life (unfortunately).
I wish I had the time that I had back when I was in high school.
The time part doesn't have anything to do with the skills though. At that age I would have never been able to do a similar thing - at my age I would probably struggle, but with enough time at hand I might achieve half of the project.
This is what makes this whole thing exceptional: this person is very talented and is using his free time to do great things - I appreciate that.
If my initial comment sounded like I was bragging I would do it too if I had more free time, it wasn't my intention. I actually am jealous that I get to spend less time on my side projects and I envy those who can build such cool stuff.
It really depends on the person and the school they go to. I've had wayyyyy more free time in my 20s than I did in high school. With kids its a different story, but having a job and no kids is peak freedom. 8 hours of work, then I'm free. Meanwhile in high school I'd wake up at 6:30, school starts 8am and ends at 4pm, sports practice until 6pm, start homework at 7:30pm and hopefully finish by 11:30pm, then rinse and repeat. Weekends just meant more homework and very long sports events (swim meets, XC races for me). Summers were more chill but I was working full time starting from 15.
Highschool was genuinely awful. So so sleep deprived and stressed. I went to a prep school so for those who didn't, your experience may have been different.
Having said that, even with unlimited time this is such an awesome achievement and really shows the dedication. Well done!