Fairly new around here, I started watching Tek Videos about a month ago, I've probably put in a few more hours than I should since you guys have so many episodes. (Usually try to go for any hour a day.)
But after watching all these videos I was kind of curious on how you guys know so much about everything basically. (Especially Wendel) Like what grew your knowledge? Constant Google-ing? A million different test benches? It seems a lot like you guys are the Wikipedia for everything computers.
Wendell has been into computers ever since he could move his fingers to use a keyboard, he knows so much because he was there when it all happened lol. As for Logan I'm not sure how he knows tech stuff.
Back in 2012 I was bored, so I searched "how do computers work". I got a lot of stuff saying "binary" or "programming" like no shit. I wanted to know how everything interacted inside of mysterious box. So I didn't stop. Eventually I search up "How to build a computer" and well.
That basically introduced me into it. Of course, there was still a lot I didn't understand as well as miss information (e.g. FX 8350 on an Intel board, etc.). Along the way I grabbed all of the knowledge I could get and eventually bought my first bit of hardware.
An AMD Sempron 145.
And I tried to put it in my laptop. Yes I was that stupid. It was $35 at my local microcenter, so what the hell. I picked it up that night and took my laptop apart. To my surprise, there was no socket! I learned the hard way. Months pass and it is my birthday. Instead of some gifts, my parents got my a $100 microcenter giftcard and told me to piss off. I went with a friend and I bought parts for what would be my first PC.
I know what I know because I took every programming and web development class my high school had to offer (which went all the way up to mid level college stuff), then went to college for it for a bit till i dropped out because the combination of my ADD and taking classes in high school led to me not paying attention, plus it didn't help I finally started dating when I hit college and was often talked into skipping class, damn women. Next thing i knew i was lost. last time I did something on the level of write an entire program or web page was 2 years ago so that part of my skill set is quite rusty but I still know what i'm doing so long as I have something with the syntax, such as a textbook, sitting next to me.
As far as pc components go, the Xbox 360 was reaching the end of its life cycle and new consoles were on the horizon and I said to myself fuck it everyone says pc is better anyways and I have a job now so I can build one! so i spent several months researching (Ironically i was out of a job shortly after having a job compelled me to do this) I found another gig and every paycheck went to a part. I built my very first rig which i sold just a few weeks ago, I kind of miss it even though my new rig is going to be insane when it's finished.
I'm still always learning, my most recent bit of knowlege I acquired was how caching works on a hard drive and I've figured out how to use ram to act as cache for both my hdd and ssd :D there's always tons of neat stuff to learn.
I gather from reading other material on Wendell, that he is competent in Drupal, Kinect Hacking, e-commerce, computer forensics, and is also a technical consultant skilled in many facets of computer-management for the commercial sector.
So it's obvious Wendell had undertaken extensive studies to become competent in his chosen field-of-expertise.
Im young so I don't know nearly as much as some of the other people here, but most of it I've learned from just trying crap. Proxmox is my favorite tool ever because I started with it as a Linux idiot and managed to figure out how to use it well enough to host a game server, and now I have Proxmox and pfSense and managed switches and the whole nine yards :P
Just try stuff. Get a virtual environment set up and try stuff (I've heard VirtualBox and GNS3 is great for this) Want to know how DNS works? Set up a DNS server. Want to know how WordPress works? Set up a LAMP stack. If you do it in a virtual machine, its awesome because if you break something just nuke it and start over.