The talk is a retrospective of the speaker's experience with hardware development over the past year. Before that, the speaker mostly did C programming for Linux, but became interested in hardware repair and micro soldering after discovering it on YouTube. The speaker then got involved in designing a motherboard and had to select ICs and draw wires between them, which led to acquiring various tools like a microscope, soldering iron, hot air station, generator, oscilloscope, breadboard, components, and reference book. With these tools, the speaker was able to design easy circuits, fix things like a coffee machine, hack a BIOS, and get into PCB design using QCAD and LibroCAD. The speaker emphasizes that having a minimal set of equipment and knowledge can be useful and fun, even for software engineers who don't work on hardware regularly.