Mountain climbing. Increases social skills, teamwork and trust.

Building a house. Increases spatial visualization and planning skills.

Electronics. Increases mathematical and problem solving skills.

Chemistry. Increases precision and analytical reasoning skills.

Psychedelic drugs. Increases imagination, inspiration and abstraction skills.

@NoMad I did get into piloting aircraft while doing the bottom one. Ended up on a little airfield near my town during a trip, was staring with childlike wonder at the glider planes.

An instructor asked me if I wanted to try, and 15 minutes later I was holding the control stick at an altitude of half a mile on 150μg of LSD. They're quite easy to fly though.

@Bitwise Growing mushrooms isn't hard! There are several shops shipping even to the US, because spores & mycelium do not contain anything illegal.

@ArcaneEye Nope. Den Helder airport in the Netherlands. Eventually got my license as well. Amazing instructor, he trained stunt pilots as well.

Dutchies 😄

@theNox I literally know nothing stereotypical about Austria or Slovakia. Nothing. Most of the time I forget they're even there, inconspicuously hiding in the shadows behind the much louder Switzerland & Czech Republic. So how do you even live in two non-existing countries at once?

I need to know one thing, one awesome unique defining thing about the place where you live, so I can remember it.

I once walked past a shroom store in Rotterdam. Seems not only weed is legal there.

@bittersweet I don't know if that's good or insulting 😅 typical for Austria is dressing in traditional clothes (Dirndl and Lederhosen) and living on a farm
@PonySlaystation might know some more haha
For Slovaks it's typical to complain about everybody and everything, to be lazy and never on time
Also it's stereotypical for other countries to assume, Slovakia isn't even a country or that Czechoslovakia still exists or to mistake us for Slovenia 😅

@theNox tbh I don't get the 3 names apart.

@theNox Right, Austria is the German Switzerland, Skiing with sausage and beer instead of cheese! Sign me up. And it played the prelude to two world wars. I bet WW3 will start when Trump visits Vienna and grabs Merkel by the boob, or something like that.

@bittersweet you and chemistry? Are you working in that field or is that just a hobby

@gitpull which 3?

@gitpull Both. I've had multiple career paths, slightly mixed together. QA/development/electronics/NDT testing in aerospace; Analytical Chemist in a pharmaceutical lab, material science lab & biochem/genetics company; And now plain webdevelopment.

@bittersweet omg. So many things... wow

Do you still do the aerospace thing and can you give me an advice on that?

I want to go to the aerospace engineering direction.
Btw. What is that NDT?

@bittersweet Nice history, but the last step sounds like a downgrade.

. following this interesting convo

@gitpull NDT is nondestructive testing. We used xray imaging, wrote the software which shows animated "slices" of welded parts, like a hospital MRI (tagged dicom/diconde streams), and which catalogued each part within the production flow. We wrote image recognition software to tag weak points within welds, and dents in surfaces as small as 10μm.

@Forside Not at all! Working for a chaotic but wonderful growing startup with a really interesting product.

The other businesses had really strict working schedules, at the pharma lab you were sometimes working in a cleanroom suit for 12 hours with one 15m break, because decontamination was a bitch.

Right now I'm sitting at home in my underpants, doing code reviews with music turned up and a glass of cognac and a steak with peppersauce for lunch.

@bittersweet @theNox haha the only loud things about Switzerland are cheese, scandals with money, jewish gold from the nazis, sepp blatter and Dj Bobo. Oh and Victorinox.
But I'd say the swiss people are quite silent compared to a LOT other countries.

I guess in Euorope evey country makes joke about every other one. No wonder there have been plenty of wars on Europe throughout the centuries. 😉

I really like Austria and it will be my first travel destination next year... Kaisaschmarrn & Schnitzel so gross wie Klodeckel 😍

@bittersweet Hah nice! Yeah, a more relaxed environment can make a huge difference. In the end we should have fun at our job.

@bittersweet Man it sounds like you've had a wondeful career and I just get so happy! It's a nice change from all the negativity.

@PonySlaystation haha gönn dir

an entire thread dedicated to programmers using psychadelic drugs

Sex. It helped me fill gaps in code.