Alen, how do you know this?

In school I studied electronics and robotics, and every few weeks somebody would ask me a version of the same question. Alen, how do you know this? Alen, where did you learn that? Usually about a component or a part that was not on the syllabus.

I never had a good answer for them, because there wasn't one. I hadn't done anything clever.

We started on Arduino in class and I got curious. So I went online, bought a cheap Arduino kit, and sat there watching YouTube and rebuilding the small beginner projects one at a time. Along the way I picked up how the parts actually behave and how to write the code that drives them. I learned to solder too, badly at first.

By the time the harder material showed up in class, and later when I got to my final project, I had already had my hands on most of it. That was the whole advantage, and it came out of a kit that cost almost nothing.

What I took from it is that I started before I knew how to start. I didn't look for the right course, and I didn't work out the correct order to learn things in. I bought the kit and made something that barely worked.

Theory is easy to consume, which is why it is easy to mistake for progress. You can read about soldering for a week and still ruin the first joint you touch. Watching someone else do it tells you nothing about how a part behaves when you have wired it up yourself and it is not doing what you expected.

So if you are waiting to understand something before you touch it, you have it backwards. Buy the cheap version and get it wrong a few times.