Assessing my Skills

I am a software developer. In fact, I am currently leading a small development team in the construction of a large scale web application project for the State of Tennessee. I'm actually quite good at it. Unfortunately, it is the ONLY thing I am really good at.

I can build things in software. I can start with just an idea and then design and construct a working, stable, and efficient solution very quickly. I can type 70 words a minute. I can code in 6 different computer languages.  I'll go ahead and brag a bit here and confess that I am self-taught. My college degree is in Criminal Justice NOT Computer Science. Somehow I've managed to sell myself as a developer to employers despite that and I've been developing software and training software developers for over 15 years now.

I started early.  I've always been a computer hobbyist since around age ten. My father bought us one of the first commercially available "home" computers available for sale to regular folks: The Radio Shack TRS-80 (circa 1980-81, I still have that machine in my attic believe it or not). While other kid's dads were teaching them to play baseball, football, build bookshelves, repair cars and such, I spent time with my Dad learning how to program computers. It was wonderful and I wouldn't have had it any other way even if I could go back for a redo.

That said, my current skill set does NOT include the following skills:

• Painting
• Sawing
• Drilling
• Woodworking
• Metalworking
• Mechanical Engineering at the most basic level
• Auto Repair (heck, let's include auto maintenance too).

Basically, all the those skills necessary to do the work with Frostbite, I am hoping to do.

Still have doubts?  Here's an example:

When one wants to hang something on the wall like a picture or some other do-dad, if it is light enough, you can just tap a little nail in the sheetrock on the wall and hang it up. Simple.

If you want to hang something heavier, though, you really need to hang it on a "stud." When I was a young and my father and I were tasked with hanging something heavy enough to need a stud, actually *finding* the stud became the challenge. We would start off pressing our ears to the walls and knocking around on the wall with our knuckles "listening" closely. I don't know what we were "listening" for really but it looked quite important. After doing this for a bit, we pointed to a spot on the wall. THAT was where the stud was.

We drilled through the sheetrock into empty space.

Well, it had to be close. A half inch should do it. After more knocking and listening on the wall to decide to move left or right of the original hole, another spot was located.

Again, we drilled through the sheetrock into empty space.

This was repeated in a line until the actual stud was found. Once we successfully located the stud (it was easy to find now since a line of holes now pointed directly at it), we usually had to find the other one because whatever we were hanging up now had to hide the line of holes we drilled attempting to locate the stud in the first place. Were studs 12 inches apart? 18 inches? 24 inches?

We couldn't remember.

No problem. Another round of knocking on the wall and listening *led* us to another candidate for a hole.

We drilled through the sheetrock into empty space.

This must be what the Captain of a naval destroyer feels like searching for an enemy submarine; keep pinging and dropping depth charges until you blow it up.

Using the above technique which I now call the "Holder-Method" to find the next stud, we eventually had another line of holes that pointed right to it.

Success! If we were really lucky, whatever we were trying to hang on the wall would be big enough to cover our stud-finding efforts.

In our house, wall decorations were generally placed in locations not for there aesthetic beauty but for their ability to cover the damage to the wall we caused during the installation.

Can I learn how to do this work, though? Probably. Do I have the interest in learning these skills? I'll confess, up to this point in my life, No. However, getting Frostbite has lit a spark in me and I try hard to keep blowing that spark until it catches fire. Which is bad mojo to bring up since I should now consider burning Frostbite to the ground as a distinct possibility. It does have a stove that runs off a propane tank. Note to self: Add Propane and gas lines to the list of things I know nothing about.

My wife seems to think that men have some genetic knowledge of how to do mechanical things.  14 years of failures, broken items, and unfinished jobs have yet to convince her that we do not.  If a job requires more specialized tools than a hammar or a screw driver, she is usually out of luck.

Now for the important question: Can I do this despite these handicaps?

We'll see. This blog with either become a shining example of my success or a humiliating record of my complete failure.  Humiliation is a frequent companion of mine, though.  We know each other well.

Now I just need to take an inventory of what Frostbite needs and what changes I want to make. I've got big plans, BIG PLANS!

Coming up:

Popping up Frostbite for the first time.