I had just moved to the Netherlands. New job, new country, and to do things properly, I bought myself a nice bike.
A week later, I woke up. The chain was still there. The bike wasn’t.
If you’ve lived in the Netherlands, you might know that moment. Mostly, I was angry. And because I’m a little stubborn, I started looking at what I could do about it.
I could buy a worse bike. Or buy one I actually liked and pay for an expensive security solution. Neither option appealed to me. So I decided to build my own: a GPS tracker for my bike.
There was just one small detail. I knew nothing about hardware.
I could code, but designing a physical device, its electronics, its communications, its power supply… that was something else. I would have to learn. And once you start pulling on that thread, you discover everything attached to it.
I found myself studying electronics, writing code for components, learning about radio protocols and how antennas work. Then energy management. Knowing where your bike is would be lovely, but the tracker needs a working battery first.
In an earlier post, I counted it up: 1,278 days on the project. Eleven prototypes. That gives you some idea of what I mean by ‘building my own solution’.
And I eventually did it. A tracker that lasted a year on one battery. I had started with a bike problem. Along the way, I had learned to build a connected device.
That device then opened the door to a research position in the Internet of Things. Without a PhD. I spent two years working on 5G security.
When I tell the story, the short version is quite funny: someone stole my bike, and I became a researcher. There was a bit of work between those two things.
What I like about that path is that I hadn’t chosen the GPS project to get that job. I wanted something that worked for me. I became interested in the problem, then in all the other problems I needed to understand to solve it. And it took me somewhere else.
I’m not suggesting you spend years working on every object someone steals from you. But if a project keeps coming back to you, even a slightly strange one, it might be worth trying something.
You don’t have to know where it will take you before you start. At the time, I mostly wanted my bike back.