Nodding hard at @wade_perez on this one. That gut feeling you get from messing with a carburetor is something a screen just can't teach you. Sure, a graph shows you the perfect numbers, but your ear learns the story of the engine. I kinda worry that skill is just disappearing, which sucks. We shouldn't lose that raw connection to how things actually work, you know

Honestly, that story about your buddy scares me a bit. If he never learned data structures, he might be writing slow code without even knowing it. My friend with the Shopify job wasted two weeks on a simple fix (like I mentioned before) because she didn't know hash maps. Skipping that stuff means you'll hit bigger walls later, when problems get complex and you can't just google a solution. It's like building a house on sand, sure you can move in fast, but one storm and you're sunk. Learning the basics early saves so much time and stress down the road, even if it slows you down at first.

Remember my friend who landed that Shopify dev gig without studying algorithms? She spent two weeks trying to fix a page loading slow, only to find out a simple hash map would have saved her from looping through a giant product array every single time.

For sure. It firms everything up so the meat does not just squish under your fingers. You can really feel where the joints and tendons are supposed to separate. I even toss bigger pieces in the freezer for like 20 minutes if I forgot to plan ahead. That little bit of extra time saves a lot of frustration later.

Seriously? We're debating hydroponic vs fabric pots like it's climate science. My grandma grew prize winning tomatoes in repurposed paint buckets on a fire escape, no LEDs or Dutch buckets required. Sometimes I wonder if we're over engineering what's essentially just putting seeds in dirt and keeping them alive.