Why Woodworking Will Make You a Better Coder
Working with Wood is Fun.
The era of the specialist is over.
Many adept technologists agree that being good at one thing is the same as being good at none; “two is one and one is none”. Those who can work across many disciplines — the polymaths — will dominate the future of business. As technology increases at an exponential rate, new industries are emerging that are the result of the cross-pollination of existing disciplines. Blockchain is a good example. Those that have a background in coding, cryptography, and web development have found themselves in the perfect position for building one of the most eminent emerging technologies of the present.
I’ve found that dissimilar hobbies can lead to unexpected transfer learning. In the following essay, I share an example of this lateral thinking; how skills in one area can inform learning and decision making in another.
I was tinkering in my woodshop after a long day of data science-ing. I often come to this dusty sanctuary to clear my head. It’s refreshing to produce something tactile after a long day of producing files that live on a server somewhere, out of reach. Working with wood tends to put me in flow the same a long jog will.
It was during one of these spaced-out sessions, mid chisel-blow, that I realized how similar woodworking and coding are. Building with a computer isn’t much different from building with a set of hand tools. The more I pondered, the more I realized how the lessons I learned in the woodshop as a kid have helped me write better code as a grown up. Follow along as I share five reasons why coders should think about trying their hand at woodworking.
It will teach you utility
I started writing code out of necessity. I had outgrown the analytical capabilities of excel and found myself fording the shallows of the R language.
Most people start woodworking in the same way; they need a box to store something in, or a coffee table to put coffee on. They slap some pine boards together with drywall screws and call it good. Code is no different- it’s a functional means to an end. No one writes code for the aesthetics of the words on the screen, they write it to do something — although I’ll admit Panda syntax is a joy to stare at. We strive to write code that’s as simple as possible, so our colleagues can decode it in the future. The more complex a system is, the more entropy will tear it apart.
Design
Let’s look at utility in the context of design. There are many interesting styles of furniture, but none match the beautiful simplicity of Shaker Furniture.
The Shakers were an Anabaptist sect scattered about New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were known for their utilitarian furniture, simple living, and celibacy (also why there are no Shakers today). As you can see, the piece above has simple lines with little to no ornamentation. It’s built out of hardwood selected for its durability and strength.
The second table is a reproduction of a Chippendale table, which is a more high-end style favored by the upper classes. This piece is stylized with carvings, frills, and otherwise unnecessary features that don’t add to its usefulness.
The next two images are original Shaker and Chippendale pieces that have aged a few hundred years. As you can see, the Shaker is in much better shape than the Chippendale. Time didn’t treat the Chippendale as kindly due to the use of laminated wood veneer, which is a paper-thin sheet of wood that glued to the wood beneath. Over time, the glue loses its bond and the veneer curls off. The Shakers wouldn’t touch veneer with a ten-foot-long chastity belt, which is a reason why their furniture has aged gracefully like a sitcom in syndication.
Templates
Efficient coders use templates whenever possible.
Woodworkers also use templates to produce consistent work quickly. For example, if I need to cut four table legs down to length, I will have more consistent and accurate results if I build a template on my crosscut saw, so I don’t have to measure and mark each leg. Another trick that woodworkers use is the ‘story stick’. Instead of repeatedly marking measurements with a tape measure throughout the project, you simply mark each measurement on one long stick of wood. Then you mark off cuts by placing the stick on the wood and transferring the measurements, eliminating the need for rulers and tape measures.
In a field of work where the term “lazy” is a positive connotation, building programs that run with minimal human input is a best practice. I’ve built several templates for EDA (exploratory data analysis) that I use to quickly and systematically analyze new data.
I realized at a young age that templating saved time and allowed me to build furniture more efficiently. No doubt, this skill transferred to my day job years later.
It will teach you to troubleshoot
Throughout the process of writing a program, you solve lots of little problems in order to solve one big problem. In this case, I define “problem” as an aspect of the build that stands on its own. For example, to build a web application that tracks stock prices, a developer would have to solve many micro problems such as setting up a database, API feeds, UI, etc. Along the way, issues will invariably crop up that need to be solved — either with novel ideas or a desultory review of Stack Overflow.
Woodworking prepares you for this work beautifully. Since many woodworking projects are bespoke, novel ideas, there often isn’t tested blueprints to work from, so the builder is forced to figure many things out for his or herself along the way, such as the best way to cut pieces from a rectangle of plywood, balancing the aesthetics of a piece or taking out “wobble”.
It will teach you bootstrapping
In the startup or business sense, bootstrapping refers to starting a project with little or no funding or support, ‘to pull oneself up by his bootstraps’. A startup bootstrapping a new app will often spend just enough money to create an MVP (minimum viable product) before testing and rolling out a more complex product in the future. In the process of the aforementioned strategy, certain aspects of development may be placed together in a less than perfect manner, with cheaper parts.
In the context of woodworking, many larger projects are first bootstrapped together with cheaper materials and methods before the actual build begins for a few reasons. Number one, it is important to see what a finished project may look like in the flesh before expensive hardwoods are used. A client will also change their mind quite often after seeing the shop sketch of their buffet table in three dimensions in front of them.
Number two, having the opportunity to build the project in this test environment allows the inevitable unseen errors to crop up. Maybe the dovetail joint you planned to use in the case distracts from the ornamental wood you wished to draw attention to in the face frame. At any rate, you invite Murphy in and let his Law take effect, so you can clean up that mess before you get to the real thing.
In addition to this prototype bootstrapping, woodworkers often lack the exact materials they need to complete a project, so they’re forced to improvise. Black cherry is a premier hardwood used in fine furniture. Due to its relative scarcity in nature, small trunk diameter, and market demand, the price of a board-foot is higher than the price of many other wood types. Woodworkers don’t always have the funds to build a chair or kitchen cabinet set with the coppery wood, so they’ll bootstrap the project by improvising with dyes and paint glazes on cheaper woods like birch. Natural cherry and stained and glazed birch are virtually indistinguishable.
It will teach you to progress
William S Burroughs is credited with the quote, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” In this global economy where workers aren’t just competing with talent in their locality, but with talent around the world, this quote should be your jam. You need to constantly improve your existing skill set as well as learn new things.
Sort your code repository or Git repo by date and look at the first program you wrote. It’s horrendous, right? Doesn’t pay any attention to folding best practices, probably repeats itself and may even lack a single comment.
If you compare that program to your most recent one, the progress you’ve made is evident. You learned how to compile a project properly. How to comment out the code that isn’t immediately self-evident. You have made a conscious effort to get better at coding, and your work has paid off
I owe much of my progression as a coder to a thirst for expertness I developed in the woodshop. The first rule of happiness is to only compare yourself to you in the past — not to other people. When I look at one of my first woodworking projects that sits in my office- a crude purpleheart jewelry box held together with penny nails- I can instantly see the progress that I’ve made as a woodworker. I started making things out of wood in the simplest way possible: screwing and nailing cheap boards together without much thought. I learned about proportion, the Golden Ratio, and the Steelyard Principle, and my pieces began to look more balanced. Eventually I moved on to routered dovetail joints, which were stronger and more attractive than the nailed butt joints of my youth.
At approximately the same time, I matured as both an R programmer and a woodworker. I make all my joints with hand tools now, and experiment with avant-garde inlays and concepts, having mastered conventional design. My R programs have also reached a polished state that allows me the freedom to experiment with more ‘fun’ concepts.
This focus on skill progression pays dividends to those that put in the time and effort to achieve mastery in an area.
It will teach you to work backwards
Do you tackle the hardest items on your #TODO list first, or do you save them for last? Mark Twain has said that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. There is always an aspect of a project- wood or code- that you know will be tricky. The project may fail if you mess up at the hard part.
I once was working on a project that necessitated the use of a hand router to shape a profile on a clock base. A router is a high-powered tool that spins a cutting bit at over 15,000 rpms; it’s easy to make mistakes in the wood that are difficult to fix, as well as mistakes in your appendages that are equally troublesome. I knew this cut would be difficult, so I procrastinated and put the whole clock together first, saving the hard cut for last. I ended up chipping a corner of the base off with the router and had to take the whole clock apart to repair it, wasting time and money. Eventually, I learned to make those tough cuts early, which made the builds go much smoother thereafter.
In yet another snafu, I built out an entire recommendation engine system for a client, only to find out later that their system couldn’t accept the data in the way that I had prepared it, wasting both their time and mine. This error changed the way I worked on data projects. Instead of working front to back- gathering data, building algs, sending the data to the client- I work in the opposite direction. If I can’t get the data to client, why work on the algs? So on and so on. By working back to front, and hard to easy, you’ll be able to fail forward faster and get more work done in less time.
The difference between good code and great code is often pronounced. We’ve all seen code like this. It jumps out to you from the Github page; it makes you say, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’ The method the dev used to solve the problem is brilliant in its simplicity. She found the path of least resistance and executed in a way that made the script efficient as well as durable. A top-notch piece of furniture has the same features. The design focuses on the beauty of the wood, so you don’t even see how the boards attach to each other; it appears as if someone took a slice out of a tree and set it in a house. Building furniture and building scripts couldn’t be more different in their execution and purpose.
But the underlying principles used by the coder and the woodworker couldn’t be more similar. It’s my hope that devs reading this pick up a nail gun, get a few blood blisters from errant mallet blows, and cross train in woodworking. It will take your game to a whole ‘nother level.
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