🦹🏼‍♂️FIELD GUIDE 69: Become a super user

This week, I bring you Andrew (Drew) Sims. He’s probably a genius, but I refuse to let him know that’s what I think.

Hes got this way of deciding he’s interested in something and then mastering it. While it may take effort, he makes it seem effortless. Which may or may not ignite jealousy within me 🤷🏻‍♀️

Drew went to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he studied Electrical Engineering and also the University of West Georgia where he studied physics.

He’s been an electronic warfare engineer with the DOD for seven years, but he has a plethora of hobbies, such as photography, painting, gaming, camping, and coding, which he shares with us today.

This week I hope Drew can inspire you to master something that’s caught your attention. Let’s aim our efforts with intention.

Happy weekend
Skyler

Name

Andrew Sims

Location

Warner Robins, Georgia

Soundtrack

We all find ourselves in an increasingly digital world. This has some drawbacks, but it offers many more advantages for those who harness the capabilities of our ever-evolving technologies. Being digitally literate is a requirement for most people these days.

There is an app for almost everything and there is a website for everything else. Knowing how to operate software that has been developed for a broad customer base with a common set of problems that need to be solved will get you by most of the time. Let us talk about the rest of the time.

We all have unique problems that we need to solve. Sometimes we can find an app that does exactly what we want.

Do you need directions to somewhere you have never been? Google maps.

Do you need to purchase something, and have it shipped to you quickly without shopping around? Amazon.

Do you need to calculate how many feet of Christmas tree lights you need to buy to line every wall in your living room? You are on your own, but being on your own is not so bad if you have some tools at your disposal and the knowledge to put them to use. The following image shows an application that you can write to solve this problem!

It is only four lines long, and it can be written in a few minutes. There is a wealth of problems of this caliber that can be solved in minutes. This is not a tutorial on how to write code, so we will not go over the specifics.

There are many high-quality guides on the internet that can teach you how to write code. Automate the boring stuff is a popular resource. This is an example of using computer programming to solve problems.

This is a simple problem to solve with a calculator, but as problems become more difficult to solve, the calculator’s usefulness declines and sometimes we have complicated problems! The point is that we solved our unique problem with a computer application that we wrote!

Okay, so you want to do more than math. When I am not hanging Christmas lights I like to paint. When painting with a reference available, it is often useful to segment the reference picture into smaller portions so that when copying, the errors made are smaller.

The following image shows the result of a 28-line application that places a grid over an image so that it can be easily transferred to a canvas that has a corresponding grid painted upon it. The code for this application can be found here.

I use this application regularly when I paint with a digital reference and it has increased my satisfaction with my final products significantly.

These examples are simple and effective, but how can you afford to spend your days hanging Christmas lights and painting?

There is plenty of money to be made if you know how to program, and I am not talking about the salary as a computer programmer (although it is not bad). The complexity of projects you can do with computer programming has no limit.

This is an application that I wrote to analyze the emotional sentiment of every comment on reddit with respect to securities traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The idea was to gauge the public’s sentiment for each security mentioned and make trades based upon that. I made several thousand dollars by using the information gleaned from this application in the first week of putting it to use.

Computer programming does not have to be complex, and it does not have to be your profession for you to profit from it (monetarily or otherwise). Anyone can get into it. I encourage you to learn how to program your computer to give you answers to the questions that you have. Program your computer to get it to solve the problems that you have.