Gregory's Server@J12t It was eye opening when I realized you couldn't get any random value of resistor.
And further eye opening when you realized that 5% tolerances were the traditional "good enough" standard for most uses..
Which led to the further eye opening that a lot of analog electronics is the art of "good enough", as opposed to software which (at least I thought when I was younger) was the art of right vs. wrong.
@gwachob Iām an EE by education. Who spent a lot more time soldering stuff together before college than during or after ā stuff that more often than not failed in ways I could never have conceived of upfront. Software is the ivory tower, where 1s are 1s and 0s are 0s. The real world is where your caps are +100%/-50%, power supplies are stomping marching bands with strange hangovers, electrons migrate wire atoms, linearity has never been seen and may well not exist, ā¦