In the ensuing discussion, he postulated something like: "I imagine it's different than woodworking and the tools you use in the shop don't change as fast. I bet a woodworker from the 1800's could come into your shop and still be proficient at using the hand tools that are similar to what they used back then. Like a hammer and nail are still just a hammer and a nail, right?"

We'll come back to this shortly.

I've spent much of my career becoming an expert in Java and the Java Virtual Machine, but I'm now working in JavaScript and node.js. For those unfamiliar, Java and JavaScript are completely unrelated and very different programming languages. The Java in both their names was merely a misguided late 1990's marketing ploy that most of us wish could be undone.

Besides Java and JS, over my 20-year career I've learned and used: Pascal, Perl, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Scala, and lots of smaller bits and pieces of other special-purpose languages. Not to mention, their runtime environments, core libraries and API's, etc.

Then there's database systems, operating systems, frontend, backend, testing, networking, engineering methodology, frameworks, and architectures. Plus when you go to work for a large company like Google, they have a lot of their own internal infrastructure you have to learn, and most of it won't have any books in the bookstores (yet).

That's a lot of tools and technolgies! Even so, I haven't really felt that it's been difficult to keep up so far. For one thing, I'm a very curious individual and I get bored when I'm not learning something new.

One of the things I love about woodworking is there's so many aspects of it, that it's difficult to master even if you can devote your entire lifetime to it. I feel like I'll never run out of things to learn. Obviously software engineering isn't going to run out of learning material any time soon either.

On a more practical level, I think when you've learned something well and understand the fundamentals of it, you should be able to apply those fundamentals to new technologies that come along.

For the time-travelling woodworker coming into a modern shop, sure they'll be overwhelmed at first with just the basics like electricity and artifical light and magical boxes with music coming out of them. But they will be able to figure out the woodworking tools because they fundamentally understand the medium of wood.

They know how the fibers of trees work together, and how wood expands and contracts over time. They understand why cutting with the grain is easier than cutting across the grain. They'll probably be able to look at the saw blades and determine which is better for each type of cut.

With programming, I think knowing the fundamentals of how the high level programming language is translated into the low level operations, bits, and bytes, and then how the computer executes it is similar to the woodworker knowing wood. Electrons are our medium.

Learning a new programming technology requires learning the details about its idiosyncrasies, but the fundamentals are the same. There's lots of non-obvious quirks in both woodworking tools and programming that just take time to learn. Sometimes they're very frustrating at first, but with more experience, I find that it's easier to deal with them because you know to look for them.

As for the technology of woodworking, believe it or not, it constantly changes too (maybe not as fast as software.) There's helical planer blades, carbide quadra-cut router bits, vacuum veneer presses, orbital sanders with quick change velcro sandpaper, saw-stop table saws that won't cut your finger off, and finishing tools like HVLP spray guns.

The biggest new tech in shops these days is CNC milling machines. CNC is "Computer Numerical Control". It's a computer controlled system like a robot which can cut or carve almost anything, as long as you can figure out how to program the CAD/CAM software. The new 3D printers actually use the same basic design and control software.

So yes, this is the world we live in. Technology progresses constantly. It always has. Fire came from sparks, then matches, and now electronic igniters. Communications were grunting, cave paintings, then speaking, writing, printing, telegraph, and now email, chat, and txting.

One thing the woodworker from the past probably won't understand is our modern equivalent of hammer and nails. Even I still don't exactly know how nail guns work. It's so much easier than a hammer though.

Addendum: I wrote this at like 2am so I failed to really answer the question in a succinct way.

Keeping your skills up-to-date isn't hard. It's just something you do naturally if you're engaged in a profession you enjoy.

There's been many times I was in the middle of something and needed some random thing that I could get at the Dollar store.

Some of the items I've bought at the Dollar store so far

Today it was ziploc bags to save some grain filler I mixed up with custom pigments.

Custom tinted grain filler

I don't recommend their home improvement stuff though. Especially not the painting supplies. I tried one of their paint rollers once. It left all kinds of fibers and crap in my finish. The plastic drop cloths might be ok.

Woodworkers use a "sled" to hold a workpiece while pushing it through a saw. This gives us a safe way to hold the piece while keeping our hands far away from the blade.

One of the first tools I made after getting into woodworking was a small crosscut sled. It has a "runner" on the bottom that fits in a slot on the table saw, and you push it over the saw blade to cross-cut a board at an exact 90° angle. (I mostly use a miter saw for these types of cuts now.)

*Picture is not my actual sled. Mine is in storage and I didn't want to dig it out just for this blog post. Credit to woodgears.ca linked below for this photo.

Another more complicated sled I made is for cutting slots on the corner of joined boards at a 45° angle.

This is how I made the slots for the splines on the corners of this picture frame.

Gluing a different piece of wood into the joint with the grain running across the miter strengthens the corner and adds a bit of decoration.

Here's a sled with a special angle to make safe, consistent cuts on the bandsaw for the pyramids that decorate the doors I'm making.

There's even a fancy sled big enough to trim a heavy seven-foot tall door.

Here are some links for instructional videos on making a table saw crosscut sled which I learned from.

http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/videos/the-cross-cut-sled/ http://woodgears.ca/deltasaw/smallsled.html

And in case you wondered, that "kid" flying off the Philly Art Museum steps on a sled is me!

One thing I'm learning from working in Michelle's shop is how frequently she uses her saw horses: every hour of every day. She uses a simple, lightweight, elegant style of saw horse originally designed by James Krenov.

This style allows you to get very close to your work without bumping into clunky 2x4 legs. They can be positioned close together for small pieces by staggering the legs. This also allows them to stack together and store easily in a smaller footprint.

I decided I needed to make some for myself. I started by taking measurements of her horses because I pretty much wanted the exact same thing. (I'll put the dimensions at the end of this post for anyone who wants them.)

I had a couple of Beech boards leftover from a closet trim project that just happened to be the perfect size for four horses: two tall, and two short.

I wanted to practice my mortise and tenon joinery so I used through tenons on all the pieces. The mortices were first drilled out as much as possible with a 5/16" bit, then cleaned and squared with chisels.

I tried a tenoning jig on the table saw for the first set of tenons, but decided it was easier to cut the rest by hand with my dozuki saw.

I've only had them for a few months, but they're incredibly useful already. They allow me to work on both of the large mohagany doors I'm building at once, and I can even store one of the doors on the lower stretcher beams to keep my worktable and bench clear for other parts of the door work, like the panels and moulding.

I used the short saw horses to hold the panels while I stained them.

Cut list

From 4/4 lumber.

• Top: 35 ½ x 1 ¾ (Qty 4)
• Stretcher: 29 ¼ x 2 ¼ (Qty 4) (oversized by 2" for two 1" tenons, final dimension between legs = 27 ¼")
• Foot: 16 x 1 ¾ (Qty 8)
• Short leg: 16 x 2 ¼ (Qty 4) (+1" for tenon = 17")
• Long leg: 27 ¼ x 2 ¼ (Qty 4) (+1" for tenon = 28 ¼")

All dimensions in inches

I was helping my friend and shop-owner, Michelle, with her computer the other day. It was running very slow for some reason, even though she has a huge amount of RAM for a laptop (16GB). During the analysis, she had many questions about what I was talking about, and I found it difficult to explain some of the concepts to someone who’s extremely smart, mechanically and technically inclined, just not a computer geek. I realized maybe if I compared stuff more directly with her world, it would make more sense faster.

So here’s a rough idea of some of the parts inside your computer, explained like you’re a woodworker. This is roughly in the order of fastest to slowest with regards to handling data.

Central Processing Unit

We’ll start with the center of the universe, and the most used tool within the computer, the Central Processing Unit (CPU). This is like many of your power tools and your workbench all combined into one thing. Basically, a Shopsmith. (Unfortunately it’s much more efficient and easier to produce an all-in-one tool on silicon than many specialized tools that could do the job better.)

Universal combined woodworking machine

The CPU slices and shapes and adds and multiplies “data”… where data just means numbers. Even the alphabet is converted to numbers for the computer. So data is like lumber. The lumber you are working with at a particular point in time is probably on your workbench or sawhorses. The CPU’s workbench, sawhorses, etc. are called “registers”.

At the heart of the machine, when it executes an instruction to add (“glue”?) two numbers, the numbers come from the registers, and the result is placed back into a register. Accessing the registers is super fast because the “lumber” is right there on the workbench next to you. But there’s not a lot of space in the registers. They can really only hold what’s going to be worked on really soon.

Cache

The next level of data storage is called the “cache” pronounced like “cash”… (Oops, sorry, we woodworkers may not know what “cash” is either.) Maybe you have some work pieces set aside near your workbench that you know you’ll need soon, but you’re not working with them yet. That’s what the cache is like. It keeps data close to the registers, and it’s fast to load the data from the cache into the registers, but not as fast as using the data from the register itself.

RAM

Where does your cache of boards near your workbench come from? You probably brought them over from the jointer and planer. So where does the data in the computer’s cache come from? Random Access Memory (RAM). The RAM is also frequently just called “the memory”. The memory is slower than the cache, but it’s still quite fast. The data is S4S and ready to work on. It just has to be moved over to your work area first.

SSD

Moving up the lumber lifecycle, we have the lumber rack. In a computer, you could think of this being like an SSD (Solid State Disk). These devices let the computer load the data quickly but it’s not as fast as the RAM. SSD’s are many times faster than our next storage element, Hard Drives. It’s like getting lumber from the lumber rack on-site as opposed to going to the lumber yard.

Hard Drive

You can think of a Hard Drive (also called a Hard Disk) as being like the lumber yard. Most computers these days will have an SSD or an HD, but not both. So what happens in the lumber yard? You have to wait, and someone has to take you around to the different piles to find what you’re looking for. If all the workers are busy with other customers, you will be waiting longer.

Inside the hard drive, the data is stored on “platters” (hence “disk”). Each platter is like a vinyl record or DVD, with the data stored in many concentric rings. These rings are read and written by a magnetic head on an arm, similar to the needle of a record player. (Sorry, I shifted from woodworking to audio equipment… but hey, you gotta have tunes in the shop too, right?)

Inside a hard drive

The basics of the hard drive mean that you may have to wait a long time for you data. Like in the lumber yard, there might be other requests ahead of you in line. And each request can take a long time if the disk has to “seek” which would be like when the lumber salesperson has to take you to the other side of the yard for the type of wood you want.

Now imagine you’re asking for a couple thousand different types of wood… and so is almost every other customer ahead of you. Slow, right? See why SSD’s are a nice replacement for Hard Drives? “Solid State” means there’s no moving parts, so much less wait time.

You might hear your hard drive moving its read/write head once in a while (probably not in the shop though…), especially if your computer is suddenly slower and waiting on data from the disk. It’s like a faint clicking sound. If you hear a whining, screeching, unnatural noise, just like in the wood shop it means something’s wrong and your data may be getting mangled by a hard drive crash. Back up your data!

A quick aside here about a tech support pet peeve:
Most novices will call both the RAM and the Hard Drive “the memory”. It’s like not knowing the difference between a combo blade and a rip blade. This conflation happens because those two specs of computers really matter when shopping, so they’re advertised and they are usually both in the same units of GB (GigaBytes — A lot of wood. Forests of wood.)

So now that you know the difference in speed between the RAM (S4S lumber in your shop) vs. HD (lumber yard), you’ll see why it’s important to keep them straight. Typically instead of calling the hard drive “memory”, we call it “storage”. It’s where all your photos, CAD drawings, etc. are stored. (For you computer geeks, S4S means “Sized 4 Sides”. It means the board is squared up, and flat on 4 sides, and ready to be used in a project.)

Another important bit of info about RAM vs HD: the contents of the RAM is gone when the computer shuts off. The hard drive data stays there when power is off. This is why you lose your work if the electricity goes out and you haven’t saved in a while.

OK, so back to the long list of storage and speed analogies. Or maybe I can make it shorter now… The “network” is like a forest. It will take a much longer time to go cut down the data in the forest and mill it up and get it all the way to the workbench. But there’s a lot of trees out there in the network (The Internet).

If you want to go just one step further (and much much slower), there’s tape drives. But now we’re back on ancient audio devices instead of woodworking.

Operating System

Where do you, the woodworker, fit in on this computational journey? Well, you’re the Operating System. The OS runs the show and tells all the other components what to do and when to do it. And there’s a multitude of OS’s, just like there’s a multitude of types of woodworking. Windows, MacOS, and Linux are the most popular, but there’s thousands of specialized OS’s like the one under the hood in your truck, or OS’s that aren’t in use much anymore (timber framing anyone?). And in the end, more than anything, the speed of your computer will be affected by the OS and the other programs. Poorly written or non-optimized programs are like a green woodworker.

Upgrades for Speed

One of the main upgrades you can do to speed up your computer is to give it more RAM. This is like the difference between a contractor table saw with no outfeed table vs. a cabinet saw with a full outfeed table that can support full 4x8 sheets. It just gives the machine so much more space to work with stuff like videos and large graphics, or to run many applications at the same time.

Upgrading the Hard Drive to an SSD drive is another major upgrade you can do to gain a lot of speed because the CPU will often be waiting for data to load from the disk instead of actually crunching numbers.

So next time you’re on the phone with tech support and they try to gloss over something or are patronizing, tell them to explain it like you’re a woodworker.