The gaps are narrowing

I’ve written about how much I enjoy sitting down at a keyboard and coding, even though the majority of what I build never gets seen by anyone but me. Writing code has been key to most of my professional successes, because knowing how to bring an idea to life has almost always given me an advantage over those who didn’t know how to code. But coding is now a commodity, and the gap I once had is gone, and this is okay. I love that anyone can literally speak an idea into existence, and if you don’t believe that, you’re at risk of falling further behind. So earlier this year, I thought hard about where I might find a new edge. And the idea I came up with was “hardware”: I’d get good at building physical things with my hands. I watched countless YouTube videos on designing circuits and learning low-level programming and working within power constraints. I followed tutorials to build my own 8-bit computer and learned how to program an ancient 6502 processor–the same family of processor used…