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When I was leaving high school and then when I was starting college, I tried a different thing: reverse engineering bar codes (specifically, what turns out to be non-interleaved code 25) and Braille based on examples in the wild.

Those were both pretty interesting exercises!

Braille I can understand, but bar codes is wild! How fast can you read them?
I haven't kept it up and don't remember the details clearly, but I could read about one digit per second when I originally learned to read them.

Of course, bar codes keep scaling up in difficulty and complexity with interlacing and error correction so it's very easy to imagine that you wouldn't be able to decode some in your head at all.