There are multiple mentions of him being motivated by wanting to shoot deer for meat. It is a through line via the article.
> The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.
I wish it were so. With a bit more self awareness the author could have said “initially picked up a rifle to learn to hunt deer, but doing so i learned how targets are scored and become interested in automating that process.” There is nothing wrong with that. But pretending that someone is doing all this coding to get better charcuterie is where it becomes frustrating yak shaving.
The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied and annotated with the utmost precision. Funny as a clinical case, not sure I'd like to be around someone like this though :)
Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it for what it is.
A perfectionist defines a goal and then finds the perfect path to get there. He was just giving in to distractions and "perfectionist" is the wrong label.
It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.
> every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting
I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours.
> if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.
Totally with you there. Though isn't what counts in the end how close you were to the center? If you look with your eyes and it looks like it was in the 3rd ring, what does it matter whether it "technically" wasn't because half a millimeter was in the next ring? It was surely much better shot than fully in the next one, unless you actually want to go to the olympics or are otherwise competing in the sport.
Don't get me wrong, I totally respect the challenge of automating the counting but that this actually helped your progress still seems doubtful to me.
> I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours
Ok, fair. Though we can surely agree that even though the automation-building that you did during all this extra time improved your skills, it was coding skills rather than shooting skills? (Which, again, is fantastic!)
Maybe it’s just that I identify so strongly with the author in that way, then - I saw that, but didn’t see it as a rationale for the rest of the article. It was just “here’s the path that led to my picking up marksmanship as an interest”.
No, that's fair (OP here) - I went to the range to learn how to hold the rifle in the first place, but indoor shooting with .22 from 25 yards in a stiff shooting jacket is as far from shooting a deer with .243 as it gets, so I stayed for the fun of it and the community around it.
I would definitely get to the point of stalking deer faster if I were to book a few 1-1 sessions at an outdoor range instead, but "faster" was never the point.
Where do you see that?
The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.