Goh Ling Yong : Learning Woodworking Felt Like Deprecating My Own Hands - Goh Ling Yong
Goh Ling Yong : Learning Woodworking Felt Like Deprecating My Own Hands
My journey from software to sawdust, and the humility of learning a skill you can't CTRL+Z.
The first thing that hits you is the smell. Not the sterile, conditioned air of a server room, humming with the quiet confidence of cooling fans, but a rich, layered scent of pine resin, machine oil, and something ancient, like time itself trapped in cellulose. The air in the community workshop was thick with floating motes of sawdust, each a tiny ghost of a decision made, a line cut, a shape formed. And in that air, I felt like a complete and utter imposter.
For fifteen years, my hands had known only one kind of creation. They flew across keyboards, summoning worlds from pure logic. I could architect distributed systems, refactor sprawling codebases into elegant simplicity, and bend light and data to my will behind a screen. My work lived in the ether, an intricate dance of abstractions built on other abstractions. If I made a mistake—a misplaced semicolon, a flawed algorithm—the consequences were digital, temporary. A quick git revert, a frantic tap of CTRL+Z, and the error vanished as if it had never been. The universe of code is a forgiving one. It grants infinite do-overs.
The universe of wood does not. That was the first and most brutal lesson I learned, standing before a stoic slab of maple that seemed to judge my soft, uncalloused programmer’s hands.
The Arrogance of the Abstract
It all started with a bookshelf. An IKEA “Billy,” to be precise, that had developed a pathetic, diagonal wobble after its third move. As I tried to tighten a cam lock that had long since stripped its particleboard home, I felt a wave of profound dissatisfaction. My entire physical world was assembled from things I didn’t understand, held together by forces I couldn't replicate, and destined for the landfill. I could build a search engine from scratch, but I couldn’t build a simple box to hold my books.
The disconnect was jarring. I’d spent my career believing that any complex problem could be broken down into smaller, manageable, logical steps. It was the fundamental promise of engineering. Surely, woodworking was just another system, another set of rules and procedures. You measure, you cut, you join. It was an algorithm executed in the physical world.
So I signed up for a beginner’s course. I walked in that first evening with a notebook, a mechanical pencil, and the quiet arrogance of a man who believed he could debug any system. I was ready to learn the API of wood.
The instructor, a man named Kenji with forearms like knotted oak and a constellation of tiny scars on his hands, held up a simple dovetail joint. It was beautiful, a perfect interlocking of pins and tails that seemed both impossible and inevitable. “This is your first project,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “It will teach you patience. Or, it will teach you that you have no patience.” The class chuckled. I, of course, took a note: “Goal: Master dovetail joint. Analyze geometry. Optimize cutting path.”
A Compiler Error Made of Splinters
My first attempt was a catastrophe. In software, precision is absolute but abstract. A variable is either true or false. A pixel is at coordinate (1920, 1080). My mind was trained for this binary world. But the physical world deals in tolerances I couldn’t comprehend. My pencil line, I learned, had a thickness. Was I supposed to cut on the line? To the left of it? The right? Did the saw blade’s own thickness—its kerf—factor in?
I gripped the Japanese pull saw, a tool of elegant lethality, and tried to follow my meticulously drawn lines. My hand, so steady when navigating a cursor to a single-pixel target, trembled. The saw blade seemed to have a mind of its own, veering away from the line like a drunken driver. The wood didn’t compile with a helpful error message; it just splintered in silent, passive-aggressive judgment.
When I finally finished the cuts and tried to fit the two pieces together, they refused. A gap, wide enough to slide a credit card through, mocked me from the side of my joint. It was a physical monument to my failure. A bug in production that couldn’t be hot-fixed.
Kenji walked over, picked up my mangled joint, and turned it over in his hands. He didn’t laugh. He just nodded slowly. “You are thinking too much,” he said. “You are telling the wood what to do. You need to listen to it.”
Listen to it? I wanted to scream. It’s an inanimate object! It has no voice! I wanted to run a diagnostic, to see a stack trace of where the failure occurred. Instead, all I had was a piece of expensive firewood and the hot flush of shame. My hands, the instruments of my intellect and my livelihood, felt like deprecated libraries—buggy, inefficient, and overdue for a complete rewrite. They were designed for the frictionless plane of ideas, not the stubborn, fibrous reality of a maple board.
Refactoring My Hands
The next few weeks were a study in humility. Every project was a fresh opportunity for error. I measured a board for a small box three times and still cut it a centimeter too short. I sent a piece of cherry through the planer and forgot to check for a loose knot, which exploded, sending shrapnel across the shop. I learned that sandpaper is not a magic eraser for deep gouges and that wood glue, once set, is a bond more permanent than most marriages.
There was no undo. There was only the "firewood pile," a growing stack of my expensive mistakes.
Slowly, painfully, I started to shed my software mindset. I stopped trying to impose pure logic on an organic material. Kenji’s cryptic advice began to make a strange sort of sense. I learned to read the grain, to see how the wood wanted to bend and split. I started to feel the chisel as it pared away a sliver of walnut, the slight vibration telling me the blade was sharp and the angle was right. I learned the difference in sound between a cross-cut and a rip-cut.
My hands began to change. Calluses formed on my palms. A fine, permanent layer of sawdust settled into the lines of my knuckles. I was developing a new kind of muscle memory, one that had nothing to do with keyboard shortcuts. I was learning the language of touch, pressure, and resistance. It was like learning to code not by typing, but by feeling the flow of electrons through the silicon. My hands were being refactored, line by line, blister by blister.
The Beauty of an Indelible Mark
The breakthrough came while I was making a simple keepsake box. It wasn't perfect. One of the mitred corners had a hairline gap. A small burn mark from the table saw marred one side. A year ago, the sight of these flaws would have sent me into a spiral of frustration. The engineer in me would have declared the entire project a failure, a corrupted file to be deleted.
But as I sanded the box smooth, feeling the warmth of the wood under my fingers, I felt something else: affection. Affection for the thing itself, but also for its imperfections. The burn mark was a record of a moment I lost focus. The gappy corner was a testament to my still-developing skills. These weren’t bugs; they were features. They were the story of the box. They were proof that it was made by a human, not a machine.
I finished it with tung oil, and as the grain of the quarter-sawn oak came alive, glowing with a deep, chatoyant lustre, I finally understood. The goal wasn't perfection. It couldn't be. The goal was to work with the material, to respect its nature, and to create something honest. Something real.
I still write code for a living. My hands still fly across the keyboard, building things from light and logic. But something has fundamentally changed in my approach. I find myself thinking about the “grain” of a codebase, the natural way a system wants to be organized. I have more patience for tangled legacy systems, seeing them not just as messy problems but as artifacts with a history, shaped by hands and minds that came before me.
I learned more than just how to cut a straight line in wood. I learned about the profound difference between the reversible and the irreversible. We live in an increasingly digital world that sells us the fantasy of the infinite undo, the consequence-free mistake. We curate our photos, edit our words, and present polished versions of our lives. But reality is not like that. Reality has a grain. It splinters. It resists.
My wobbly IKEA bookshelf is gone now, replaced by a sturdy, slightly imperfect one I built myself. Every time I look at it, I see the ghost of a mis-measured shelf and a slightly off-square joint. These flaws don’t mock me anymore. They remind me of the deep, humbling, and ultimately transformative power of making an indelible mark on the world. They remind me of the beauty of a skill you can’t CTRL+Z.
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