Why Do I Bodge?

Hello world

This is my first post in what I hope to maintain as an ongoing record of the daft little projects I work on in my spare time.

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself working on increasingly varied projects with no particular purpose.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Following my latest foray into the previously (for me) uncharted territory of embedded development, an esteemed colleague and friend asked me a perfectly reasonable question:

“What was my plan when I’d finished it?”

I had no answer.

What was I doing this for? Who was I doing it for? Why was I even doing it?

As a new father, I already have remarkably little time to do the necessary things in life, never mind voluntarily introducing a series of completely pointless engineering projects into the equation. The irony of addressing this shortage of time by starting a blog is not lost on me.

But after thinking about it for a while, I realised that perhaps I didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t meant to be one.

I’d been making things like this for years without ever really questioning what they were for. From the outside, I suppose the obvious purpose of a project is the thing you end up with. You want a thing, so you build the thing. The project is simply the inconvenient bit between wanting it and having it.

Apparently not, in my case.

Somewhere along the way I’d accidentally fallen into the practice that the project itself was the point. The figuring things out. Disappearing down rabbit holes. Learning things I had absolutely no reason to know. Making mistakes, working out why they were mistakes, and eventually just about getting something working…then promptly forgetting it all.

The finished object is nice, of course, but it turns out that’s not really why I’m doing it.

I just like doing this stuff.

And, somewhat embarrassingly, it took somebody asking me what the point was for me to realise that there didn’t need to be one.

There was, however, one slight problem with this revelation.

I’d spent years learning all sorts of oddly specific things as a by-product of these projects, only for most of them to disappear into the increasingly poorly organised filing cabinet that is my brain. Six months later I’ll vaguely remember that I solved a particular problem, but have absolutely no idea how I solved it.

And that, I think, is where this blog comes in. Finally, a project with an actual purpose!

I want to document the things I make, but more importantly the process of making them. The wrong turns, unexpected problems, obscure snippets of knowledge and little discoveries that happen along the way. Partly in case they’re useful to somebody else, but largely so future me can come back and work out what on earth past me was doing.

So these aren’t necessarily tutorials. They are certainly not examples of best practice.

Think of them more as field notes.

A record of my explorations into electronics, development, craft, building, woodwork, mechanics, music, games, luthiering, repair, restoration, making things beep, putting computers where computers probably shouldn’t be, and whatever other rabbit holes I happen to fall down.

Consider it a contribution to the emerging field of Applied Bodgery.