[HN Gopher] Why I prefer making useless stuff
___________________________________________________________________
Why I prefer making useless stuff
Author : azhenley
Score : 705 points
Date : 2021-05-23 17:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.eecs.utk.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.eecs.utk.edu)
| mattlondon wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with this.
|
| There is a lot of sentiment on HN about how you should be making
| a side business or selling your own stuff or being your own boss
| or getting your first 100 paying customers or your $xxxxx MRR or
| whatever.
|
| That is all fine, but I think that line of thought can be a
| little bit toxic at times: you _don 't_ have to be continually
| hustling for the next dollar all the time - it is ok to do stuff
| simply for the joy of it.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| I disagree with this. Sure, hackers get excited at people
| posting business/financial success stories, but a big chunk of
| HN gets super excited about hacks that are smart but have no
| economic viability.
|
| This comes in stark contrast to the
| IndieHackers/ProductHunt/Twitter builder communities, who are
| all about making revenue and not about tinkering and doing cool
| hacks.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Most of the projects I do for fun is either project I know
| customers are working on, or stuff we already have at work. This
| gives me a goal, and gives me a sense of how hard the problem
| actually is. If it does work out, no one care, the thing already
| exists.
|
| I also have a project I normally use when attempting to learn a
| new language. It involves naked women and copyright violations,
| but it get's me around most aspects of a language and gives me a
| sense of how complete a language and its eco-system it.
| cosmojg wrote:
| > It involves naked women and copyright violations, but it
| get's me around most aspects of a language and gives me a sense
| of how complete a language and its eco-system it.
|
| You can't just leave us hanging like that. What's the project?
| mrweasel wrote:
| One of the Danish newspaper have a page 9 girl (like the UK
| page 3 girl). One of the magazines have a "girl of the week"
| (they also have a male version if that's more your thing).
|
| For my learning project, for the last four language I looked
| at, my code grabs the latest "page 9" girl every day, and
| builds up an archive. Because Denmark is a small country, the
| girls in the newspaper will frequently have appeared in the
| magazine at some point, to it checks their archive and try to
| build up a merged archive.
|
| It's a neat little project for learning, because you need to
| do at least: http requests, regex, database integration, an
| web application (to browse the archive), scheduling and how
| to use modules/package/third-party libraries. Later
| iterations also adds a REST api, so I can use the project to
| learn how to write JavaScript application.
| atatatat wrote:
| Custom "The Fappening" viewer?
| Areading314 wrote:
| > A typed Lisp compiler with a focus on performance
|
| Not useless and much needed!
| spottybanana wrote:
| Doesn't sound like useless to me, these projects sound very
| educational.
| grouphugs wrote:
| must be nice to be so fortunate, but this is just regular nazi
| greed
| pythonist wrote:
| I must say that I also relate with the author and would add that
| making things just for fun or your own curiosity or even need,
| can be beneficial to others too, directly or indirectly. With
| every toy project, new skills are acquired. Useful or not, you
| cannot now at the time, but I can say that if I did not make toy
| projects, I would not have jobs that I had and some of the
| projects that others also find useful, like
| https://newreleases.io, would not exist.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >A "better" CHIP-8 that supports networking and sound
|
| CHIP-[?] that supports unicode and symbolic algebraic computation
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There seems to be a critical role of _consequence-free
| exploration_ (or at least consequence-reduced) in creativity.
|
| Richard Feynman's commentary on being burned out and playing with
| ideas of spinning plates, which culminated in his Nobel Prize
| award, comes to mind. Recently featured on HN (and something of a
| perennial favourite):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359
|
| https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html?rep...
|
| You'll find similar observations regarding corporate research and
| development. See David Hounshell's work on R&D at DuPont:
| _Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R &D 1902-1980_,
| originally published in the 1980s.
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/science-and-corporate-strateg...
|
| Similar stories exist for AT&T's Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM
| Research, and even Ford Motor Company's research division. In the
| case of the latter, Henry Ford (in)famously gave his engineers
| significant discretion, but somewhat-less-than-optimal equipment,
| the latter apparently a spur to creativity in order to overcome
| limitations.
|
| Geoffrey West has discussed this regarding the Santa Fe
| Institute, I believe in the Q&A of this presentation:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko (At 1:09:00)
|
| West quotes the late Max Perutz's guidelines for organizing
| research, in full:
|
| _Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple
| guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be
| highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no
| reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly
| motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment. Certainly
| not the way research is usually run in our fuzzy democracy but,
| from a man of great gifts and of extremely good judgment, such a
| reply is not elitist. It is simply to be expected, for Max had
| practised it and shown that this recipe is right for those who,
| in science, want to beat the world by getting the best in the
| world to beat a path to their door._
|
| http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituari...
|
| As an anti-creative environment, the most effective obstruction
| is to ensure that _everything_ is not only consequential, but a
| path to failure. This tends to emerge in oppressive and
| excessively bureaucratic environments. John Cleese outlines the
| general parameters toward the end of this presentation:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
|
| The start-up world seems to me to increasingly exemplify the
| high-consequence, no-win environment.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| The thing I love most about useless projects is the freedom to
| not explain anything to anyone.
|
| That's the part about painting that I love the most too. You
| don't understand it? I don't care
| rdiddly wrote:
| Building useful stuff with a "user base" of one falls under that
| too. I'm my own customer.
| nicbou wrote:
| Since a little less than two years, I live from a website I
| built, and I have a lot more control over my schedule.
|
| Since then, I built a lot more useless stuff. I'm the only user.
| I can hardcode things, introduce breaking changes, manually
| migrate data and so on. I can cut corners, or over-engineer
| everything. Other people can use it, but I don't care about what
| they think of my variable names, or which features they want.
|
| The turning point for me was the concept of apps as home-cooked
| meals [0]. If a gardener can grow flowers only he will see, I can
| write code only I will run.
|
| [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
| massysett wrote:
| I think of it as my in-house software. Most software businesses
| write never leave the business, with a lot of the remainder
| being written in a support role just to further other business
| needs, not to be sold (such as a bank's online banking phone
| app.)
|
| But it might be even better than in-house software. I don't
| have to collaborate with anyone. I can observe "best practices"
| or not. I don't have to care about rough edges like bad error
| messages - I'm the programmer and user, so I know what the
| message means.
|
| I'm calling it my return to hacker roots. Unix was written for
| hackers who cobbled together quick solutions to personal
| problems. I no longer feel pressure to share my creations -
| sometimes I think people get minimal benefit from what I share,
| but it's more work for me than it's usually worth. Sometimes I
| feel bad about "not giving back" but many people "giving back"
| have their own self-driven reasons, such as building their
| portfolio of work. I have a day job so these reasons don't
| exist for me.
|
| My most useful software is my meal planning and grocery list
| system. I've been using it over ten years now. Occasionally I'm
| asked to share it but it's a very nasty personal creation. I
| have no desire to share it. I do need to overhaul it though.
|
| Linus Torvalds says he uses some hacked-up abomination of a
| text editor because it works for him and he knows it. That's
| the hacker spirit.
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| Created an account again (lost old few weeks old one lol)
| just to reply in enthusiastic agreement on the utility of
| barebones custom software - but not so much due to the lack
| of public-facing maintenance and the responsibilities that
| lie in parallel. Frankly, my own reasons hinge on annoyance
| with status quo consumer-facing solutions gone boiling over.
|
| Ex: I've taken to creating my own CRUD programs for iOS or
| likewise for shell-based Python scripts on a desktop for
| things from lists & reminders, tallies, to some minuscule gym
| data tracking, and a few memory logs. I grow weary of bloated
| apps and programs built for a remarkably simple purpose but
| lacking just basic malleable parameters - and yet swelling in
| size, latency, cost. Or hell, advertisements and "social"
| shit haranguing me at every menu bar. What the fuck? Hell,
| music applications are lousy with them - _as with YouTube
| Music or Apple Music._
|
| So yeah, I'm all for it. My life is too short to acquiesce &
| tolerate the specter of proprietary watered-down stacks
| without reservation where I consider it desirable & plausible
| to do otherwise.
| Cullinet wrote:
| write to the moderators to get your account back if you can
| provide adequate supporting information - this is what I
| did only so long after I'd begun this account and only
| emailed to inquire in a "kick me cruel world" moment...Just
| try if it means something to you because definitely the
| administration cares about keeping the HN community swell
| and together
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| This is what I love and have loved about HN, haha.
| Thanks.
| Cullinet wrote:
| I think that when people hark to hacker roots or however you
| want to call the experimental unconstrained and free wheeling
| pursuit of intellectual satisfaction through commanding over
| technology, I want to shout out aloud "hackers don't ship
| they deliver works of art "!
|
| I really was looking forward to reading a deeply
| philosophical introspective considering the poverty of
| creation that can result from incessant pursuits of
| relentlessly necessary and important objectives that you have
| no part in deciding on in any way regardless of the
| obviousness of futility or impossibility. Impossible tasks
| multiply most flourishingly in your nearest non tech founded
| startup, if you need a refresh. Meanwhile the best of us
| regularly encounter projects that we cannot apply any
| benefits of our skills and experience to help or even avert
| failing. To a certain degree this is commonplace, I mean, not
| the default mode experience of experienced professionals in
| tech. We definitely can relate nonetheless.
|
| I find pointless work refreshing and it revitalises me in
| every way. I tend to choose painting for my pointless
| occupational diversions, but isn't it a definition of art to
| need no purpose to exist?
| nicbou wrote:
| I can't understand what you are saying
| Cullinet wrote:
| whilst I don't consider that comment exemplary English,
| and I'm inclined to rewrite or edit it, may I ask if I
| understand what you are saying to me, first, and if I am
| to take what you say literally or not?
|
| my reason for asking is because the most common concern
| raised when someone's saying that they can't understand a
| statement or comment uses the phrase "I can't understand"
| in reference to a particular area of confusion or
| incomprehension. In this case, I would prefer to clarify
| the point of your concern in a postscript instead of
| editing the original text, since that's much better for
| the integrity of the discussion.
|
| However, because omission of all mention of what's
| desired to be understood, in this form of inquiry so
| particularly diminishes the likelihood of success for
| your (rhetorical, implied) inquiry, or else is a omission
| possibly due to inattention or haste, and I have observed
| almost identical responses to a increasing sample of
| comments other than to my own from where I have been able
| to discern additional semantic information about the
| question posed, and this has been a reliable negative
| indicator of sincerity and a consistent indicator of
| positive derogatory intent on the part of the non
| understanding declaration, I consequently do not wish to
| fall into a conversational trap set up only to insult or
| deride anything that I have said. Indeed, since you have
| stated that you don't understand what I'm saying, and
| this can be taken to mean total incomprehension on your
| part, obviously simply rewriting my comment alone is not
| any guarantee of my being able to help you at all. Since
| this is something that I feel strongly about personally,
| I am entirely happy to completely structure my original
| comment anew and break it down into the constructive
| components and argumentative logic to convey my meaning
| with the maximum possible clarity.
|
| in absolutely no way am I meaning to condescend to you or
| criticise your motivation or personal character in this
| response - absolutely the opposite : the difficulty this
| presents is that if eg English language comprehension is
| involved in a fundamental part of your reaction, then I
| will need to consider this and compose any renewed
| comment accordingly. For example this reply itself is
| complicated grammatically and I will restate myself in
| accordance with your response if any. The only reason why
| I write this way initially is because I want to convey
| the nuances of my predicament as clearly as possible to
| the audience in general and also for the consideration of
| the moderators if by any chance this is interpreted in a
| negative light that I haven't been able to anticipate and
| prevent from affecting the most broad perception of my
| writing which is by virtue of being a public forum
| necessarily and preferably my primary concern. In
| different circumstances but in cases of apparently
| identical correspondence with the same comment on my
| language, when I failed to appreciate the pejorative
| intended meaning and absence of goodwill in the statement
| that I replied to, it happened that the negative
| overtones superimposed and obscured all beyond the
| cursory impression of a snarky exchange and it was
| thought that I was engaging with a troll deliberately in
| order to start a cryptic flame war in the guise of
| semantics. I wasn't and I am not now attempting anything
| of the sort. But as is clear from my defensive language
| already, I've been caused to infer something potentially
| negative which effect I'm entirely certain could have
| been averted had you made your comment more understand,
| as well.
|
| (I've worked on concurrent channel linguistic analysis
| since the early nineties following a successful project
| processing telephone sales transcripts for outcome
| prediction. English is far more wealthy and rich in
| structure than even linguists sometimes realise.
| Purcell's Lewd Songs are the most excellent introduction
| to the capabilities and subtlety of cryptic communication
| in the English language. Temporal dithering of phonetics
| in the 4 part harmonies are used for singing two
| simultaneously radically different song lyrics. The
| cryptic verses are the "Lewd" as in "and bawdy" verses.)
| cco wrote:
| I really enjoyed this post, thank you so much for writing it.
| It made me think of a lot of "personal app" ideas I've had over
| the years, almost all of them orbiting around the idea of
| sharing something with my family friends in a more simple and
| straightforward way than off the shelf apps.
| nicbou wrote:
| I didn't! It was written by a different person
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| A problem I experienced with this is future-me is another user.
| So some aspects of documentation, ease of use etc became more
| important. Of course, that's my decision whether to support
| future-me or not, so is consistent with your philosophy. But
| it's quite difficult if I do, to know how much, and what
| exactly, is really needed... because, well, I can't google for
| it.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| I made a commandline tool that shows my APIs "from outside":
| what is public; do names make sense from that point of view;
| can you see the basic use/idea?
|
| NB: (1) I made easy improvements it indicated, but not hard
| ones. (2) the tool itself is super-hacky.., partly my
| philosophy to impl once to understand the problem, once to
| solve it (because there's no point designing "the right"
| solution before you've encountered the whole problem - and I
| haven't yet.)
| bch wrote:
| This. In school I was taught: "in class, you learn the lesson
| then you get the test. In life, you get the test then you
| learn the lesson."
|
| This parent-comment musings drive home the importance of
| documentation, or complete project management. You'll feel it
| viscerally and whatever the experience, you're responsible
| for it.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yep. My personal projects are documented as if I had to
| hand them over. It's partly because I like writing
| documentation, and partly because I really enjoy those
| readmes and comments later.
| acbabis wrote:
| I've found that learning to empathize with future-me, also
| made me better at writing code that others want to read. Kind
| of like dogfooding.
| gitgud wrote:
| > _Of course, that 's my decision whether to support future-
| me or not_
|
| What a great phrase, I'm going to remember it next project
| do. I get angry at past-me sometimes for the gibberish he
| wrote.
| andai wrote:
| I was reminded of this thread while reading this Unix Koan:
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr//writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I have only ever made "home-cooked apps". Not sure I would
| enjoy writing software for other people.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's a very different job, especially if you must work with
| other developers. That introduces a lot of overhead.
| headmelted wrote:
| Genuinely curious - Are you saying here that you have a blog
| that runs on your own code or your income comes from the
| project?
|
| I only ask as if you've discovered a way to produce an income
| from coding something your own way while still having no-one
| else to answer to then I too would like to reach Valhalla and
| you must show me the way.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Show us the way!
| [deleted]
| nicbou wrote:
| It's a content website with affiliate income, nothing
| outstanding. It worked really well, but that was just luck. I
| didn't expect that, and I couldn't do it twice.
|
| Before that, I worked programming contracts, and 3-4 months
| of those per year would also suffice.
|
| Given our profession, many of us could also work less and
| live on half their income.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| https://images.app.goo.gl/G4k1Tu3mYCaFJ1dw8
| Popegaf wrote:
| Why does anybody care what you do during your free time as long
| as it:
|
| - is fun
|
| - doesn't hurt anybody (except possibly yourself)?
|
| Go write books, programs, plays, scripts, go do sports, go do
| drugs (responsibly), go drink, go play board games or online
| games, just do it. It's your life, your body and your decisions.
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| The number one reason at this point in my life (44 years old,
| fulltime programmer) that I tend to not have any side projects at
| all is my absolute disdain for physically being tethered to a
| computer.
|
| After a full week of staring at a screen and sitting too much (I
| alternate between standing/sitting desks all day) and typing, the
| last thing in the world that I want to do is more of that. Which
| is unfortunate, because there are numerous fun programming
| projects that I'm itching to do.
|
| So I play music and make elaborate chalk art with my kid and
| garden and ride my bike like a madman. And I suspect that I'm
| better for it. (Though I'd probably be better at my day job if I
| were doing those side projects.)
| fictorial wrote:
| I am in the same place. I am 46 vs 44 and run vs bike but
| otherwise we're twins. In the past, I'd get excited to know I
| had a free block of hours to sit and explore new tech or work
| on a new project. Now, with the same free block of time I'm
| itching to go explore some new trails.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| 47yo runner checking in. I'd rather do just about anything
| outside than touch a computer on my time off. Admittedly, it
| _is_ a complete 180 from when I was younger.
| kharak wrote:
| I realized at some point, that I would actually love coding, if
| it could be physicalized. Like the games Factorio or
| Satisfactorio. Give me VR/AR and a 3D programming language and
| I'd get willfully lost for days.
|
| But sitting or standing for hours and hours in front of a
| screen, I'm starting to resent it. This goes so far that I
| started thinking about building a backpack with an extendable
| arm to hold my laptop in front of me. Still 2D and physically
| moving doesn't add to the programming task, but at least I
| could move while working.
| elliottkember wrote:
| Try a treadmill desk! I used one once. Very slow speed. Just
| shifting your weight from foot to foot really. Ambling.
| Surprisingly nice!
| boothby wrote:
| I didn't know anything about compilers, but I figured out how to
| compile Piet programs, so I wrote a compiler[1]. The project has
| stalled out for (a) lack of free time and (b) some silly
| ambitions, but _I don 't care_ what the public thinks about my
| lack of updates, and that's great. In the meantime, I've been
| going down weird rabbit holes and learning aspects of computing
| that I missed in school.
|
| [1] https://github.com/boothby/repiet
| neolog wrote:
| I'm curious how much money you make from the affiliate links on
| your site?
| brundolf wrote:
| It's funny, my favorite useless projects have also mostly been
| compilers and game engines!
|
| +1 to this mindset. I would go even further and suggest that
| useless projects tend to be _morally_ superior to useful ones. A
| lot (not all) of the useful software out there ends up being used
| to make the world worse, but useless software can only ever
| inspire joy (in yourself and, hopefully, in others).
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Personally, I got to the point where I realized that trying
| hard to make software that's useful can turn a side-project
| into something stressful, essentially a second job on top of my
| regular full-time job, which I just can't do, too much risk of
| burnout. Trying to turn something into a side-business adds a
| lot of constraints. You're not just playing anymore, you have
| to optimize everything towards the goal of making profit.
|
| However, I still think you can enjoy working on things that are
| useful, to yourself and other people, and not for profit. The
| projects I'm the most proud of are projects I've shared that
| have been used and appreciated by many users online. You just
| have to keep the project small and simple, and keep your
| expectations low.
| chii wrote:
| > useless projects tend to be morally superior to useful ones
|
| people have claimed that crypto mining is useless too - but a
| lot of people also claim that crypto mining is morally wrong
| since it consumes vast amounts of electricity for "no reason".
|
| I think there's no such thing as morally superior, and a
| project is never useless to any and everyone. A "useless"
| project is taken to mean useless to everyone else but the
| author (since it inspires joy - which makes it not useless).
|
| So in other words, a project that's only useful for yourself is
| morally superior. However, that's just another way to describe
| selfishness. So by the transitive property, being selfish must
| be morally superior!
| ratww wrote:
| Agree. Something else: Useless software is also very
| educational.
|
| I'm also into compilers and engines. I learned 3d programming
| by looking at small projects online. The "worse" the code, the
| easier to learn. If I had tried to follow the
| Unreal/Unity/Godot codebase I'd still be at the intro screen.
| WalterGR wrote:
| What's the game? shown in the second image from the left?
| azhenley wrote:
| Unnamed and unreleased :) I occasionally work on it when I
| can't sleep. I hope to release it one day...
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I love making tiny projects for fun and not for profit, using
| tools I enjoy working with and not tools I would need to scale to
| a trillion users, trying ideas I like and not ideas I can
| monetize. I almost forgot why I enjoyed coding.
| seg_lol wrote:
| It isn't useless by any stretch, it is non-Commericial, it is
| playful, experimental. I understand the sentiment and the
| terminology, not challenging it, but being silly and playful
| should be just as valid as making a your next open source side
| hustle.
|
| Once things start getting _serious_ for some definition, a whole
| other cloud rolls in. There is now a right way to do things, but
| how do we know this is the right way. How do the boundaries get
| pushed? Much of the time, best practices is a signaling phrase to
| have an in group and an out group.
|
| Things like esolangs give one cover to be playful. For example if
| you try metaprogramming in Python, you will be called out as
| unpythonic. If you create classes in Python with public member
| variables, you will be ridiculed.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| The worst thing is there's always people commenting:
|
| Why are you reinventing wheels? Why don't you just use Unity?
|
| These trigger me every time.
| dw-im-here wrote:
| The world isn't ready for one, let alone _two_ new todo apps for
| iOS
| ulzeraj wrote:
| I'm far from starting any personal project at all during my
| Saturdays but I do have a useless stuff fascination.
|
| I'm often wondering myself why I watch so many videos about
| people fixing or modding old Amiga and 68k computers. Those
| computers are bare and raw compared with what we have today.
| However I find those fascinating. I wonder what is like to write
| programs in these machines.
| [deleted]
| xyzelement wrote:
| This is subjective, but my personal threshold for when "useless"
| is OK or not depends on what's going on in the rest of your life.
|
| If you are making a good living, your family is taken care of,
| etc. etc. then go ahead and make as much useless stuff, because
| empirically you are making good life decisions and your useless
| stuff is just fun - doesn't detract from value, or perhaps even
| helps you learn useful skills that translate into your money-
| making life.
|
| On the other hand, if you're having employment or financial
| problems of any sort, the last thing you should be thinking about
| is "useless" stuff, because there're indicators in your life that
| you should be focusing on how to make more value for yourself (by
| making things of value to others.)
|
| I guess that's the same for everything, not just useless
| projects. I'd have the same criteria for watching a lot of TV -
| fine if your life is on track, probably should stop if there are
| other problems!
| schwartzworld wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with having a hobby for the sake of it
| just being fun.
|
| But if you insist on thinking about everything in terms of
| money, realize how many well-paid programmers started out as
| hobbyists. Learning to create now can translate to big bucks
| later.
|
| For me, I build software for a living, but a lot of my hobby
| projects are completely useless to anybody but me. I build them
| in languages and tools that require me to think differently,
| and the new way of thinking influences the code I write at
| work. This has paid off in terms of career trajectory, for
| sure. There is a bonus, in that me being a better programmer
| means I can spend less of my time figuring out how to write it,
| which means more time with my family.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I have spent the past five minutes trying to come up with the
| politest way to say "I wanna smack your miserable Greyface ass
| with a copy of _In Praise Of Idleness_ " and I have given up.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| This is something I try to be careful of. Programming takes time,
| which is an opportunity cost as we get older. If I was well off,
| I would love to relax my mind on projects not going anywhere.
|
| However until that point, I try to do something that I feel has
| some value (or hope will one day).
|
| That said, I do agree with the general premise that work is where
| we spend to make money and we should relax in our spare time. The
| criteria for me is that I should enjoy what I'm doing and it
| should have some small chance of success. But as long as I enjoy
| it, then I'll be okay. Better to do a project with 2% chance of
| success that I enjoy than one of 50% chance of success that I
| feel like a chore. Life's too short.
|
| However I would not be able to actively do a project with zero
| chance of any value (learning can be achieved through many ways,
| so I don't count that as value on the outset, only as
| justification for the time spent afterwards). I rather go for a
| walk then. There are only a few hours a day where I have the
| energy to code, it's too precious to waste.
|
| (ps sorry for the over use of first person - just wanted to share
| my perspective)
| ExtraE wrote:
| > (ps sorry for the over use of first person - just wanted to
| share my perspective)
|
| Why do you feel bad about/dislike first person (in this
| context)?
| abhinav22 wrote:
| It becomes (or at least implies) too much anecdotal, which is
| not ideal for a unopinonated discussion.
|
| Excessive use of first person imo is a good flag that the
| writer is too self concerned (egotistical), which can
| interfere with their judgement (as it's affected by ego and
| not a cold, rational look at both sides). Which I'm guilty of
| from time to time.
|
| I realized that as I was halfway through, but it was too late
| in the night so I just pressed reply :)
| _wldu wrote:
| I agree 100%. All my programs are "Toy Programs" and they are
| very fun to build and use.
| raevilman wrote:
| I agree. I tweeted my thoughts on same lines an hour back. But in
| my case, project is going to be a bit long term.
|
| https://twitter.com/raevilman/status/1396683828907941888?s=1...
| zoren wrote:
| I'll tell you one thing about useless stuff. Sometimes it turns
| out to be useful, only in a way you hadn't imagined.
| leifg wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion over the time. Mainly because I
| figured out:
|
| When you want to build stuff for profit, coding is an
| afterthought. There are so many tasks necessary that involve zero
| coding. You essentially become your own product manager that
| needs to talk to (potential) customers, completely reevaluate
| your value proposition, do marketing sales. The more time you
| spend on coding, the higher the chance your assumptions about
| what people want are wrong.
|
| If you want to spend 100% coding I would argue that's impossible
| to make profitably.
| nly wrote:
| "Coding" is a small part of most software engineering roles
| though.
|
| I mean I think I've written more code in 2 weeks working on
| useless hobby projects than I have in 2 years professionally.
| I'm not even exaggerating
| trangon wrote:
| Sounds like you aren't working on a greenfield project,
| granted most people aren't. But it's not like that for
| everyone.
| supernihil wrote:
| Over the years ive found myself with my "hobby art-ware" between
| two seats: programmers/engineers that, contrary to my
| expectation, dont see the value and ask questions like "is it on
| product hunt?" And the other camp being my artist friends who
| ask: "what do you wanna say with this, what is the concept"
|
| I finally have found piece in my "stuff" being a product of my
| intuitive curiosity and therefore not bound by the same laws of
| explanation :-)
| refactor_master wrote:
| On the one hand I fully understand the hobbyist aspect, as well
| as how it could make a candidate better. On the other, it's a
| slightly sickening work ideal.
| ogou wrote:
| Some the comments here are disheartening. So much crass dismissal
| of anything not monetized. A lot of what we use on regular basis
| got started with simple ideas for things with limited usefulness
| at the time. I remember when there was much more creative energy
| in this industry. Obviously, tech is a major economic force now.
| But, that pretense of creativity and exploration is still being
| exploited. That's why we are funneling entire generations into
| coding classes, maker spaces, and youth empowering tech
| initiatives. They are being told, "learn to love coding. explore
| your dreams". Very quickly they get redirected into conformist
| production paths so they become tools. What a shame.
|
| Long live creativity and self-determination.
| greenyoda wrote:
| > _So much crass dismissal of anything not monetized._
|
| And yet, so much of what is being monetized these days is being
| built on top of technologies that their creators gave away for
| free.
|
| Off the top of my head, I can think of three very influential
| technologies that their creators (initially one person) gave
| away for free:
|
| - The world wide web
|
| - Linux
|
| - Python
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's ironic. Where do software companies get their highly
| technically competent developers? Most of them don't train
| people, nor do they give enough time for developing deep
| technical skills. They _rely_ on people who picked up most of
| the necessary experience prior to joining, and then maybe
| transferring some of their knowledge to others. But where do
| those original knowledgeable people gain their skills, if not
| at their jobs? By doing useless side projects.
| mehphp wrote:
| They don't sound so useless to me then :)
|
| They clearly led to the development of skills that produce
| great economic value.
| rualca wrote:
| > But where do those original knowledgeable people gain their
| skills, if not at their jobs? By doing useless side projects.
|
| So much this.
|
| The time you have is a finite resource, and technical
| expertise is a function of how you invest your time in
| activities that enable you to learn and grow.
|
| More often than not, your job is not aligned with your career
| plan or growth path.
|
| So how is it possible to bridge that gap? Well, through your
| own persona projects, projects whose goals are set by you and
| are not encumbered by third party requirements and don't even
| have to have a business model. Just coding.
|
| Corporations want the reward of investing time in learning
| and exploring, but they don't want to foot the bill.
| ra423 wrote:
| I have crushed so many of my cool ideas by "who would use this".
| Now I know why should I create stuff even if no one is going to
| use it.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Did someone say useless stuff! I love useless projects.
|
| Do you need a doctor that is published on the procedure you are
| about to have?
|
| https://www.opendoctor.io/research/?research_papers=mohs+sur...
|
| What about ranking doctors based on their Opioid subscription
| count? I got you covered.
|
| https://www.opendoctor.io/opioid/highest/
| anta40 wrote:
| This is very cool.
|
| If I were interviewing for candidates, I'd definitely ask for
| their "useless stuffs".
|
| Sure, being able to develop and maintain whatever you need for
| your company is important, but sometimes you don't have much
| degree to employ your creativity.
| tooltower wrote:
| This is exactly why I hate the expansive IP contracts I've had to
| sign with my employer. It effectively requires me to ask
| permission for publishing these useless weekend stuff, robbing me
| of the joy.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I just cross those bits out - I'm just writing a crud app for
| you - and you want to own everything I think - yah, na, happy
| to sign over copyright for the code I write for you (literally
| the conversation I had for my last contract). If they say no,
| oh well.
| adamius wrote:
| Is it useless? Compare coding these projects to Dorodango
| https://www.laurenceking.com/blog/2019/09/26/dorodango-blog/
|
| Perhaps the act is the end in itself. The journey in this case is
| probably more important than the destination.
| mosselman wrote:
| This is amazing. I totally see the parallel to coding little
| things that are 'useless'. It is a form of meditation maybe.
|
| Working on 'useless' code is a sort of massage for the mind
| sometimes.
| Delk wrote:
| I think the important thing is that considering a project
| useless frees one of any obligation to think about its
| usefulness. It might not be useless but its value might come
| from not trying to be useful.
|
| Which is probably what you meant anyway, but I think "useless"
| means two different things here.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same approach over here.
|
| I try new approaches and languages, occasionally something gets
| dumped into Github for the usual headhunters requests for HR
| filter.
|
| Turning them into useful stuff for others? Well that is what work
| is for.
| phonebucket wrote:
| > I've always pursued my interests without much regard for final
| value or value to the world ... I've spent lots of time on
| totally useless things. - Claude Shannon [1]
|
| He is known for a large number of playful side projects.
|
| [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/claude-
| sha...
| stemlord wrote:
| Obviously it's not useless. I'd say it's super important even,
| because it fosters a culture beyond the dominant capitalist
| culture of consumption for the sake of consumption which seems to
| eat away at every facet of living leaving complete emptiness of
| meaning in its wake. This is fundamentally what 20th century
| capitalist critique is all about and IMO a big reason why
| contemporary art practice is all about critical theory
| ssivark wrote:
| Love the OP's attitude. It's perfect for anyone looking to
| explore computing as a medium.
|
| The HN comments they quote (shipping for customers, and avoiding
| pointless homework) come from a very different perspective --
| where the medium being explored is not computing, but rather the
| process of satisfying specific human needs in the context of a
| "market".
|
| Both have their own value; it's just that they're completely
| orthogonal in intent and worth not conflating.
| jfoster wrote:
| The quote attributed to me was on the topic of "challenging
| projects every programmer should try":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21790779
|
| It's not that I would recommend every project must have
| customers, but I do think that most programmers will learn &
| grow tremendously if they take on a project where they are
| trying to directly satisfy a set of customers. It came to mind
| because whilst there's a tendency to focus on projects that are
| technically challenging or interesting, I think such a project
| would perhaps prove even more challenging, albeit in very
| different ways.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Sounds like this is how he keeps his interest in coding alive and
| his ability to enjoy it in spite of getting paid to do it. If you
| only do what you get paid to do as a coder, you may grow to hate
| it and this can be career-ending. You could suffer burnout or
| just decide to quit or get fired and no one wants you anymore.
|
| The first rule of sustainable productivity is taking care of the
| thing doing the producing. If that's a human, that isn't limited
| to physical wellbeing, especially if they are producing knowledge
| work.
| nn3 wrote:
| I talked to someone who just finished their CS degree. He said
| "The school had all the rights for the graduation work, so I made
| sure it was a useless as possible"
| blocked_again wrote:
| My philosophy is, as long as you are financially independent, you
| earned your right to work on useless projects. If not focus your
| energy on making a recurring source of income which generates
| money even if you end up in hospital for 1 year.
| jlokier wrote:
| My philosophy is that it is harsh to treat it as a luxury that
| should be limited to those who achieve financial independence,
| because most people won't achieve that independence no matter
| how hard they try (or if they do they will be rather old, i.e.
| retired), but the need for creative leisure and self-expression
| throughout life is strong in a lot of people.
| blocked_again wrote:
| I agree. My comment was mostly from the perspective of a
| software engineer. I have not achieved financial
| independence. Is no where close at the moment. But still the
| philosophy remains. I don't think it's that hard to achieve
| financial independence especially if you are a software
| engineer. So giving up even before trying is not the most
| optimimum decision I think.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The usefulness question is the a poison to discovery.
|
| How many things we use in our daily life would have survived the
| first peer review for usefulness?
|
| The printing press? Makes no sense, use scribes. The public cant
| even read.
|
| The internet? Why would people use a computer to communicate and
| share data? Its super slow, just send a magnetic drive or even
| better, copy the images on paper.
|
| Solar power? We have coal, oil, nuclear, that stuff has no
| future.
|
| If something is not useful, in dubio assume, that it is, but you
| just are not capable of seeing the use or the market it will
| create.
| ExtraE wrote:
| I mean, your point is a good one but those are bad examples.
|
| The printing press was made to print bibles in bulk.
|
| The internet was made by the DOD and universities, not to
| transfer large files/images but for small text documents.
|
| Solar came from LEDs which were discovered by accident by
| scientists working on other semiconductors (trying to find
| something useful), but to your credit probably explored because
| it was interesting. 99% of the work done on solar now is to do
| something useful.
| calltrak wrote:
| I built this useless project https://picc.io its for sharing
| images. The idea has been done to death I admit and there is a
| snowballs chance it would take off. I can't seem to get any one
| to use it.My visitors stats are a joke. Imgur owns peoples minds
| in this space! And I suck monkey balls at marketing (not
| literally, i'm glad to add)
| beardyw wrote:
| Now I am retired and have chronic fatigue where interaction with
| others exhausts me, programming without any pressure is a great
| way to settle my brain. Probably not for everyone, but having
| been coding for nearly 50 years it's what I am made of!
| [deleted]
| revskill wrote:
| I once tried to setup isomorphic Haskell webapp (haskell on both
| server and client) and i learnt a bunch of things. The result is
| useless, not practical but their knowledge is practical, and it's
| what matters to me, not the result.
| asimjalis wrote:
| I love this. I feel the same way as OP. Question in my mind is
| why is this? Can we understand what makes our own useless
| projects so engaging?
| scaramanga wrote:
| The intrinsic urge to create. That and the fact that the
| creation is taking place outside of any coercive or
| exploitative relationship.
| nicbou wrote:
| You accept from the start that you will be the only critic,
| user and contributor of the project, so you do whatever you
| want.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| My own guesswork answer: a 'useless project' necessarily
| combines a personal interest with the total absence of external
| obligations. Productive work sometimes has the former property,
| but rarely has the latter.
|
| A successful _useful_ unpaid project might feel like an
| obligation, if there are users and a community around it.
|
| Note: does not apply to Fabrice Bellard, with his remarkable
| talent for building incredibly useful software on a whim, on
| his own, in secret (at least initially).
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I think I'm somewhere in between. I like thinking about (and
| sometimes building) things that are possibly useful, but
| difficult or painful to monetize. Kind of an academic approach
| where I don't need to grovel for funding.
| stadium wrote:
| I've been building a useless app in my free time, an hour here or
| there, for the last 2 months. Then last week at work, I got a
| chance to contribute to a project that happened to use the same
| stack. It was random luck. And the useless project prepared me
| for the useful one that pays me a salary.
| nly wrote:
| This happens all the time to me as well.
|
| I think the flip side of this is that, for most of us, it's
| very hard to learn new and interesting stuff in our paid
| software engineering roles. Day to day tends to be dominated by
| maintaining code you didn't write, dealing with business
| concerns, or greasing the tiny wheels in the big machine that
| your team covers.
| laymonage wrote:
| Before I decided to pursue my CS degree and write software for a
| living, I was afraid that getting stressed from university/work
| would make me hate programming. One of the reasons that kept me
| going was because I still try to find the time to make stuff like
| this. It reminds me how programming can be fun.
| mam3 wrote:
| Sure its nice to be "loving what you do" and its always better
| than having somensort of external pressure.
|
| Now saying you really prefer to do specifically useless stuff
| seems like glorifying a weakness for no reason. Why not leaving
| an open door to both have fun and make money ? Seems like the
| author tries to make some moral/practical higher ground because
| he cant deal with the ambivalence of whether what he does is for
| some "inherent" pleasure or for money.
|
| At the end of the day the way your deal with you psychology is
| not my problem. Having fun if is cool. Making money is cool in
| another way. If mixing both is too hard for you the maybe you
| really dont have any real problem in your life. That post wont
| get too much of my sympathy.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Yea it seems like OP is writing a bunch of throwaway projects
| that don't go anywhere. What's the point of writing software if
| nobody is gonna use it? I'd rather go do something else. Like
| go hiking or swimming or something....
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like coding videogames as much as the
| next guy but it's like, if nobody is gonna play it then what's
| the point?
| gammalost wrote:
| The point is that he enjoys them. Throwaway project can be
| like a puzzle (at least for me). Pick a subject, find some
| problem and figure it out.
|
| I could ask the same about going hiking, what's the point of
| that? You're still back home at the end of the day.
| cupofcoffee wrote:
| The point is you get better at it.
| hamburglar wrote:
| And some people find it fun.
| mrwoggle wrote:
| Yeah, you become a better programmer. And if it is fun
| while you at it, it another win.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| yes, we need more toys!
|
| https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/
| tester756 wrote:
| Over years I had shitton of random `abnsadc234` named projects
| that I used to learn, test, grasp, actually implement some
| concept.
|
| The thing about $customer_ready software is that huge % of it is
| just "boring" stuff, the exciting $core is just small part.
| cryptica wrote:
| Making useless stuff is nice if you and everyone else knows that
| it's useless and you can optimize the activity for maximum
| learning.
|
| I hate making useless stuff when everyone else believes that it's
| useful. Then the work is usually tedious, repetitive, stressful
| and frustrating. There is 0 satisfaction. You just want to waste
| as much time as possible to maximize your hours/income.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| I think toy projects are a great exercise to innovate your
| conventional way to write code.
|
| For example you can't necessarily improve if you can't simply how
| you write. Readability is essential in code. So practice makes
| perfect and writing for profit often requires redundancy which
| does neither the programmer or the customer any good.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's why Factorio is such fun and addictive crack for
| programmers: it's 100% useless stuff! There are no stake holders
| screaming for features. No QA nit picking and submitting bugs
| against your unique artistic self-expressions. No customers
| canceling their subscriptions because they don't like the coal
| smoke belching megafactory bitcoin mine you just built in their
| back yard. You can do whatever you fucking well please, for as
| long as you want, and don't have to answer to anyone. The only
| existing life in the universe is you and the bugs. And you can
| disable the bugs if you like! What other programming environment
| has a "disable bugs" feature that works?
| dheera wrote:
| I build a lot of "useless" stuff too. Where by useless I mean
| useful to me, but isn't ever going to have customers.
|
| A. Educational value is a thing. Not everything needs to be a
| business with customers. Not every project needs to make money.
| Many of my projects teach me something about science, tech, or
| arts.
|
| B. Fun is a thing. Building stuff is a way to enjoy life for me,
| similar to spending time on the beach.
|
| A couple of my more "useless" projects:
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/4x5/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/mnist-clock/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/einkframe/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/shoji-lamps/
| radiator wrote:
| Someone who wouldn't want to undersell those projects could use
| the term art instead of useless.
| dheera wrote:
| Oh I just called them "useless" in mockery of the HN sense of
| the word, i.e. in the same sense of the word that TFA speaks
| of: not being able to scale it into a unicorn startup with
| customers.
|
| But yes, they are useful to me as art, as educational
| projects, as fun, etc.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > And if those aren't enough, I have several more useless
| projects planned! I can't wait to get started on them:
|
| I feel like this is such a key technique for maintaining momentum
| with your personal projects -- always keep a list of things you
| want to work on next. I'll often find myself day-dreaming about
| the next thing on my list while I'm still tinkering away on my
| current project. After I realized how important this was for
| myself, I started noticing other people doing it too; apparently
| whenever Bob Dylan had an idea, he'd write it down and put it in
| a box. When it came time to create, he'd open the box.
| ajxs wrote:
| I definitely identify with the author. A big mistake I made in
| the past was to assume that other software engineers are equally
| enthusiastic about these kind of projects, or the least bit
| impressed by them. I was asked for a job interview to prepare
| presentations on two projects I was particularly proud of. I
| chose a hobby Operating System kernel I'd developed from the
| ground up, and a fully-functional MIPS assembler I had written.
| The interviewers (senior developers within the company) really
| just did not _get it_. Responding with questions such as: _" Is
| this going to make you any money?"_, and _" When do you expect
| this to be complete?"_. They really couldn't understand my
| motivations. I did these projects for no other reason than that I
| love programming, and I have never stopped loving learning about
| it. I have never needed to consider, or justify to myself _why_ I
| did these things. I do them because I enjoy what I do.
|
| I ended up pivoting to discuss some comparatively banal
| professional project migrating a mid-sized financial product to a
| new tech-stack, which managed to captivate their attention. I
| found this experience extremely disheartening, however important
| a lesson it was to learn. I don't think it's changed my outlook
| in any way though, admittedly. I still work on the same kinds of
| projects, and I still think the best developers are the ones who
| do work on toy projects for their own enjoyment.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Dodged a bullet there. What is the company like if the
| interviewers are like that?!
| [deleted]
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Well they were interviewing you for a job not having a chat at
| a meetup or at the pub. I don't think it's an indictment of
| your interests rather if you "get" the question they're asking
| you
| jefftk wrote:
| That's a really disappointing reaction you got. If I was
| interviewing someone who described having implemented a kernel
| or an assembler for fun I would be thrilled!
| scaramanga wrote:
| Right!
|
| If GP is looking for a job then for the love of god, please
| email gianni at my-hn-user-name dot co dot uk :)
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the
| job?
|
| A very common topic about programming is how useless are most
| whiteboard job interviews, as they challenge the interviewees
| on something they will never use in the job.
|
| Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that
| a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be
| one of them.
|
| In regards to the GP story, I'm also saddened that the
| interviewers didn't show interest for those projects. Kernel
| development indicates a high aptitude for many kinds of
| unrelated programming jobs, but not for most of them.
| Especially "enterprise" jobs. For the purposes of the
| interview the "banal professional project" is likely the
| relevant one.
|
| If anything, having the senior developers show no interest is
| a good thing, and indicates that even if the candidate gets
| the job he probably won't enjoy his time at the company.
| ajxs wrote:
| > Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming
| that a white-board problem, but kernel development might
| just be one of them.
|
| This is true. I'd counter that though by saying that I
| don't think there's any other project that's taught me more
| about the nature of what we do as programmers than
| Operating-System development, even just the little I've
| done. In order to build even the most basic, non-functional
| toy kernels you need to gather a comprehensive, holistic
| view of how compilers, operating systems, and computer
| hardware interact.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming
| that a white-board problem, but kernel development might
| just be one of them.
|
| Kernel development involves reading vague documentation
| (that might be wrong) and figuring out how to make things
| work with not always useful or immediate feedback. And
| reading other people's similar code to check for clues.
|
| If that's not relevant to day to day development, I've been
| working at the wrong places. Yes, you don't do a whole lot
| of page tables day to day; but ocassionally you might need
| to make something work better or faster, and having deep
| knowledge of how you might put something like that together
| will help a lot as you dive into the murky depths of
| whatever actual OS you work with. Or you could open a
| support ticket with your vendor, I dunno, people always say
| that's an option, but I've never seen it happen, and it
| takes longer to make a clean example program to share
| outside the company than it does to dig in and fix the
| problem.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think in general people severely underestimate how useful
| seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is.
|
| Keeping with the example of creating an OS kernel,
| foundational programming skills translate across
| everything. So kernel development shouldn't be a negative
| signal in regards to programming ability.
|
| In regards to kernel development itself, I think it's
| probably very valuable experience not because of the
| programming but because of the perspective the person has
| gained. I have no experience with kernel development, but I
| would hazard that you need a very different mindset and
| approach compared to application development.
|
| I think the perspective you gain from being forced to adopt
| a different mindset and approach is massively undervalued
| by most people because it's not immediately obvious how
| that experience is useful or directly applicable.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I think in general people severely underestimate how
| useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is._
|
| I'd go as far as saying people who've never done this
| level of hobby work don't _understand_ the amount and
| breadth of experience and knowledge one gains this way.
|
| A OS kernel or an assembler for a niche architecture
| aren't something you _just do_ like another work task. It
| 's not something you half-ass under deadline pressure by
| gluing together some third party libraries, StackOverflow
| tips and hastly skimmed documentation. Your boss would
| never agree to pay you for the amount of time and care
| that's involved in hobby projects like these. A month of
| such a project will teach you more about computing than a
| year on the job[0].
|
| Unfortunately, this kind of experience is hard to keep
| track of and neatly summarize on your CV. If you tried,
| you'd end up with a page or three extra, and people would
| think you're just keyword stuffing, and doing it badly -
| referencing niche, unmarketable technologies, seemingly
| related to nothing[1]. These skills are important and
| very useful, but they don't look like it until you need
| them[1], and you're unlikely to pick them up on the job,
| unless there's already someone who had them before
| joining the company, and is now teaching others. There
| just isn't time. Taking care, or spending time sharpening
| the saw[2], is considered time not spent delivering
| business value.
|
| Since most software companies aren't really training
| their workforce much, it's kind of dumb to ignore off-
| work experience - after all, if your company isn't giving
| people time to skill up, why assume previous companies on
| a candidate's CV were different?
|
| --
|
| [0] - It might not teach you how to work in a team
| setting, though. That's what jobs are good at. That, and
| teaching you what "good enough" is.
|
| [1] - Like, I wouldn't put "Event Tracing for Windows" as
| a qualification on my resume, even though me being
| familiar with it saved the company a lot of money they'd
| otherwise spend on people continuing to fruitlessly chase
| a heisenbug.
|
| [2] - Or, God forbid, writing tools for yourself.
| chii wrote:
| Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions
| irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the
| criteria for acceptance into the job.
|
| For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial
| might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production
| of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an
| advertising production agency) might only want to care how
| much professional experience they have shooting
| commercials.
|
| Sure, these experiences in "unrelated" work might show
| qualities that could be applied to this job. But you aint
| paid for your broad and wide interests in the topic - you
| are paid on being able to implement some work/feature that
| somebody else told you to do. And in fact, if you require
| intrinsic motivation to actually perform well, you might
| end up being a liability to the team, rather than an asset
| - after all, if the work is boring, and you lack intrinsic
| motivation for it, you might slack off, or over-engineer it
| to make the work more interesting to you. Or you might end
| up being a difficult person to work with for other team
| members because you sit so far above them intellectually.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _For example, an actor applying for a role in a
| commercial might cite their side role in doing a
| theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but
| the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might
| only want to care how much professional experience they
| have shooting commercials._
|
| Does it work like this? I guess it depends on the point
| in actor's career. If they're 10+ years into commercial
| acting, then community theare _might_ not be relevant,
| but at the start of one 's career, it seems to me to be
| _highly relevant_. At the very least, it demonstrates the
| person knows the basics of acting, can follow the script,
| and has experience dealing with the support structure
| (director, sound /lighting technicians, etc.). This isn't
| fundamentally different from what they'll face when
| shooting a commercial.
|
| Also: at least over here in Poland, most film actors come
| from classical theatre background, they study in
| theatrical schools. Any kind of theatrical background is
| highly relevant.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| Wow. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
|
| If an interviewee has a pet operating system they've
| developed they can probably figure out your CRUD app.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Whether a kernel hobbyist will want to work on your CRUD
| app is another thing.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Sometimes that kernel hoobyist will just want to afford
| food and rent.
| homie wrote:
| The analogy here doesn't make sense. It'd be more like
| the actor mentioning that he doesn't have any experience
| doing commercial work, but he has acted in a theatrical
| production before (suggesting that he's adaptable and
| willing to do more than just one kind of acting job).
| Haga wrote:
| Mercenaries hate knights, cause if there is something you
| can't buy for money, it's passion.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| That's literally what happens for most business or
| leadership interviews. The only common thread for most of
| them is that they ran a company. They may know nothing
| about the market, the customer, the product or anything
| else related to the business, it may even have failed
| miserably, but because they have an MBA and hired a
| handful of people they're somehow competent for the job.
|
| How about we hold those people accountable to the same
| standards? Hell, most of your politicians are that way.
|
| You have dentists commenting on how pandemic response
| should be.
|
| For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist
| destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and
| he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature.
|
| > Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate
| mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be
| the criteria for acceptance into the job.
|
| Are you f'in kidding me? Either we hold the other useless
| part of society to the same standards we hold ourselves
| accountable to or we give each other a break.
|
| EDIT: and for all the ignorant folks thinking Trumps
| schoolyard bully rhetoric did anything but empower the
| CCP keep in mind that Chinas nickname for Trump is "Chuan
| Jian Guo". Trump the nation builder(guess who's nation
| they are talking about). And as much as I disliked Obama
| and his TPP, it was the answer to the new silk road.
| Trump basically handed China the entirety of Asias future
| on a silver platter, and in return the US got what? 10
| billion in trade deficit balances? Completely laughable.
| Or the new Blue Dot(completely fitting name by the way)?
|
| https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-
| from...
|
| Blue Dot is described, officially, as promoting global,
| multi-stakeholder "sustainable infrastructure development
| in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world."
|
| It is a joint project of the US Overseas Private
| Investment Corporation, in partnership with Australia's
| Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Japan
| Bank for International Cooperation.
|
| Now compare it with what just happened this same week at
| the inauguration of the China International Import Expo
| in Shanghai.
|
| As Xi stressed: "To date, China has signed 197 documents
| on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30
| international organizations."
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist
| destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and
| he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature.
|
| Nothing could be more wrong.
|
| Trump was the best President the US has had in 75 years.
|
| He was 100% correct about:
|
| 1) The need for a border wall. Biden's poor messaging has
| resulted in around 100,000 children separated from their
| parents and warehoused in the US currently.
|
| 2) The need to address the CCP. Nobody else was able to
| oppose the Cold War invasion of US' education and
| financial institutions until Trump/Pompeo addressed this
| - a mythical performance.
|
| 3) The need to stop flights from China early in the
| pandemic. The decision is obvious today, but he was
| called a racist for demonstrating the leadership he was
| elected for.
|
| 4) Europe is now aware of their need to pay their share
| of defense spending, which historically was half of what
| was agreed.
|
| Some con man. The Dems/Marxists are re-learning the above
| the hard way.
|
| In case you don't understand what MAGA means, it means
| America First, which should always be our policy.
| Instead, the current administration is "sisterhood
| first", which I'm sure delights the CCP, Russia and
| political Islam - all ideologies against everything that
| made America great.
| Talanes wrote:
| It would be weird if you brought up your community
| theater role at a commercial audition and their question
| was "Is this going to make you any money?"
|
| Even if they don't consider community theater roles to be
| relevant experience, a casting director/interviewer
| shouldn't be caught off guard by them.
| gravypod wrote:
| > You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate
| the job?
|
| At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where
| I had a high influence on hiring: yes absolutely unless
| someone more qualified with the same excitement came around
| (aka Rob Pike walks in).
|
| At Google interviewing is complicated. There is a lot on
| the Google careers site about this if you're interested. If
| you brought this up while doing team matching it will make
| people's eyes light up. My TL liked that I was doing game
| dev, R&D, and OS dev for fun and I think it's a large part
| of why I was chosen for my team.
| IQunder130 wrote:
| Kernel development would be a stupid thing to put in your
| requirements list as it would generate too many false
| negatives, but it should definitely be a nice bonus for any
| candidate since it demonstrates a fairly high basic level
| of competence across the board.
|
| Nobody's complaining about whiteboard coding challenges
| because people who ace them suck at writing code. It's
| because a far greater number of perfectly competent
| programmers will fail any given challenge of that type
| above trivial complexity.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| > because people who ace them suck at writing code
|
| Is there such a high correlation? I used to do a lot of
| hackerrank-style problems for fun, a few years ago. If I
| had to evaluate my ability to write code back then:
| pretty crappy.
|
| I was good at writing functions, I was bad at writing
| programs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think their point is, there's just _so many_ bad
| candidates that even among those that pass whiteboard
| coding challenges, most can 't code - but it increases
| the ratio of good to bad coders in the pool, so in lieu
| of a better option[0], it's still used.
|
| --
|
| [0] - There are plenty of better options, but they tend
| to not scale - so they cost more, and companies avoid
| them.
| [deleted]
| scaramanga wrote:
| Sounds like a tell-tale sign of a work environment in which
| genuine enthusiasm is not a survival trait :)
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's just a different type of enthusiasm. Some places
| need/want people really enthused for computer science. Other
| places want people really enthused for whatever domain they
| are in. Other places want people really enthused for solving
| customers pain. Other places want people really enthused for
| a cause. Being enthused for x when a company wants enthusiasm
| for y just makes it a bad fit. It doesn't make either party
| wrong/bad/whatever.
| scaramanga wrote:
| I wasn't trying to be judgemental. It could be, for very
| valid reasons, that genuine enthusiasm for programming just
| isn't valued or is viewed indifferently at that place
| rather than necessarily being something that is either
| going be crushed out of you or else you'll leave or be
| pushed out...
|
| Edit: grammar.
| XorNot wrote:
| Genuine enthusiasm is lethal in any work environment. IT is
| considered a cost center and people who actually care keep
| asking for things which cost more money or overcomplicate a
| manager's work day.
| stadium wrote:
| I've found it is cultural and more nuanced. IT can mean a
| lot of things too, many of which are not related to writing
| software. And if internally developed software is not
| adding a competitive advantage, should it really be
| internally developed?
|
| If genuine enthusiasm really is lethal, it sounds like a
| toxic work environment.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| It's good that the leadership was more interested in your
| useful professional projects rather than the less useful things
| you make for fun. As professionals in a business they should be
| more focused on trying to make money. People need to have some
| kind of strategy to make money in order to survive in business
| for any extended amount of time.
| allenu wrote:
| I've found the same thing. I love working on projects in my
| spare time, a lot of them completely pointless, but fun. I've
| seen the reactions you describe and it feels like talking to an
| alien.
|
| I've learned as well that not everyone enjoys working on code
| in their spare time, or if they think they might enjoy it, they
| just don't have the motivation to begin. On the flip side, when
| I do bring up a project I'm working on and see someone's face
| light up and they describe something they're working on, I feel
| an instant connection.
| holri wrote:
| "Is this going to make you any money?"
|
| The answer should be: yes, because you are hiring me now for
| the skills I learned doing this.
| vms20591 wrote:
| Kudos to you, for working on the stuff that you really like.
| These toy projects could teach us or the people that see them,
| a lot of stuff.
|
| "Senior Developers" doesn't mean that they will relate to
| everything related to software development. Either, they stick
| to the domain they work on or, to the ones that makes money.
|
| Personally, I've always been fascinated with systems
| programming, thought I'm not much proficient or put in much
| effort. Whether something is going to make money or not, like
| many personal stuff we do (art for example), isn't eventually
| going to make us money, rather it gives us a sense of
| satisfaction.
|
| Keep doing what you do!
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > "Is this going to make you any money?"
|
| Well, statistically speaking, neither will the commercial
| project, no matter how useful.
|
| It's too bad interesting but ultimately useless projects hold
| so little weight in interviews. But I don't know if it's clear
| cut that they will be less profitable than commercial projects,
| which fail more often than not. Expanding your skillset may be
| more profitable in the end.
|
| I've been thinking of pivoting to useless myself. With projects
| of some commercial potential I have to have a novelty budget,
| usually ending up with Node.js and React because as boring as
| the stack is you can always Google a problem and have the
| solution handed to you on a platter. But so far none of them
| have made me any money. They have given me some business
| experience, though, but I get even more pushback from
| highlighting or trying to apply that in my day job. They want a
| good little worker bee, not someone who will be gunning for any
| business development positions.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| An important lesson for me was that doing side projects during
| my free time didn't make me a better developer at work. Writing
| a video game or even a webapp without the constraints of
| working on a team and having business needs that you don't get
| to choose. Partitioning "work programming" and "home
| programming" as two separate skills in my mind has been very
| useful.
| legends2k wrote:
| My experience had been the opposite. Most techniques,
| patterns and tricks I learned in pet projects improved my
| work code. Of course, this is only work's code part, other
| business stuff like meetings, constraints, etc. didn't get
| affected so much.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Yeah that's what they're saying I think. Programming
| outside works helps your programming inside work sure. But
| for many (most?), programming ability isn't the limiting
| factor on how effective you are as a _developer_ at work.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which is something I consider a big scam pulled on the
| people entering this workforce. You expect to be using
| your brain to build great, useful things - but in
| practice, you're expected to be a people person
| collaborating on doing mostly crap job under tight
| deadline pressure. No surprise burnout is a problem in
| this industry.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| I mean spread awareness but that's pretty much every job.
| I've done a lot of kinds of work in my life but this is
| pretty much the easiest. At least we're paid well and
| respected. All the other kinds of work were just as hard
| under as much or more pressure and also for poverty
| wages. I'll stick with this one lol.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're absolutely right. We have it quite good, all
| things considered. It's not like I'd have chosen another
| career if someone told me how the real world works up
| front - but it would've saved me a few years of pain due
| to mismatched expectations.
| allenu wrote:
| I was thinking about this recently. Loving to code and
| getting better at designing and implementing code only goes
| so far in the industry. To really "level up" you have to
| learn a whole bunch of other things related to project
| management, communications, and politics.
|
| I use fun side projects to really level up my software design
| skills because I can take on bigger tasks and have total
| freedom to experiment with different designs. I don't think
| I'd be the programmer I am today without all the side
| projects I've done over the last 20 years. On the other hand,
| work has taught me how to work on a team, how to communicate
| well, how to make political trade-offs, and more.
| antihero wrote:
| > The interviewers
|
| Wow, they are seriously missing a beat. If someone is making
| useless stuff, it shows they are passionate, which is hugely
| valuable because people will work hard and make great code
| because they enjoy themselves.
|
| Maybe I've just got lucky but here in the UK whenever my
| passion has bled through in an interview it's been recognised
| and I've got an offer.
| Fanmade wrote:
| I'm currently one of those interviewers and we always ask
| about fun projects like these. We do that especially since
| that shows that they're not doing the job only for money, but
| also because they're passionate about developing software.
| This helps on multiple levels. For starters, if you focus on
| one task for too long, that may result in you having a too
| narrow view on that problem. While doing a fun project on the
| evening your mind wanders and sometimes suddenly you get an
| idea to approach that pesky work problem in a totally
| different way, even though you were thinking about something
| totally different. Or when you return to your specific work
| task you can just look at it from a fresh perspective. Or you
| get a new work-related task and suddenly think "Oh, I could
| just use part of my [Bobble-Head simulation] algorithm here
| and this could save me a few hours." If someone says that
| everything you are doing has to have a specific goal other
| than just "for the fun of it", I wouldn't want to work with
| them.
| randcraw wrote:
| Folks with a deep interest to investigate complex systems
| in their spare time are unusual -- curious, inventive, and
| driven. They seek epiphanies about how the world works and
| are and willing to dig deep to learn about it.
|
| People of this type are displaying the rarest part of the
| 20,000 hours of practice that's most essential to achieving
| greatness -- they're pushing themselves to exceed their
| limits to explore the unknown -- to get better and see
| farther. And they're willing to try and fail. They're the
| inventors, the disruptors, the source of all creative
| change in the world.
|
| I suspect most employers won't welcome that attitude. Like
| most people, they're happy to wear blinders to disruption
| in their routine (AKA new ideas / better ways). So let them
| hire programmers who were accountants in a former life.
|
| If that kind of person is not you, then you're in luck.
| True to form, in choosing to discuss your passions, you
| interviewed differently. In doing that you discovered
| something very useful -- this is a place where you do NOT
| want to work. Epiphany revealed; the search continues.
| andersource wrote:
| I strongly relate. I spent a couple of weekends working on some
| procedural art [0] and was pretty happy with the end result.
| When I showed it to some of my co-workers / manager, they were
| _baffled_. "Uhh.. OK. Why did you make this?"
|
| [0] https://andersource.dev/2020/10/10/procedural-
| butterfly.html
| deergomoo wrote:
| This is really cool! I love things like this, they make the
| world more interesting.
| chevill wrote:
| I'm not in charge of hiring people but I think your project
| is awesome.
|
| I do DFIR though and from time to time I help with
| interviewing potential security analysts. If someone has the
| skillset needed for the job and on top of that they are so
| passionate about technology that they work on even
| tangentially related projects outside of work its largely
| regarded as an excellent indicator that they'll be a good
| hire. Obviously that's not the only type of good hire but its
| one of them.
|
| If I was the person you responded to afterwards I would have
| come to the conclusion that the interviewers were genuinely
| stupid people. Even if you don't know anything about OS
| development you should understand as a person that works with
| computers or a recruiter that hires for the industry that its
| a non-trivial project.
| seanwilson wrote:
| Nice! Have you considered adding flocking
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids) with lots of them
| flying around? For a "useless stuff" project, I coded this
| for bats (all the same model) flying around. It's really fun
| to play with the flocking parameters to make them behave like
| bees, fish, birds etc. and it's not much more code than a
| regular particle system.
| andersource wrote:
| Thanks! And that's really cool, added to the TODO list!
| graderjs wrote:
| Sometimes I post things on Show HN that have people seemingly
| baffled. I like to retort that I made them because I wanted
| to. It's what I chose to do. I enjoyed doing it. People don't
| seem to think that's good enough. I think to a large extent
| coding can be like making art. You don't have to explain what
| you're doing. You can do it because it satisfies you. Not
| every "coding product" has to be an actual product. I think
| engineers in general would do well to learn to appreciate
| things from an artistic perspective and be comfortable with
| ambiguity in purpose and meaning, and even if there was a
| clear purpose, they don't have to know it to appreciate the
| creation. I know it's tricky, because engineering is by
| necessity such a logical, needs-clear-definitions type of
| undertaking, but there's also so much creativity that happens
| in the space as well. I think the "space as a whole" is
| lessened when people only what to judge code products in a
| utilitarian or easily understandable sense. Sometimes you
| just make things because you can, because you choose to, or
| because you want to. And that's cool, equally (or more) valid
| and can be very special and powerful. Practically for some
| people it might even be a good antidote to the common trope
| of "culture / industry malaise or disillusionment", while at
| the same time helping people learn and improve their skills
| doing something they like. Ultimately, everyone's different,
| and I get if some people want to factor all the work they do,
| including learning, from a "how will I bank this?"
| perspective, and that's cool, but I just think there's room
| for more views, and they should be appreciated, and certainly
| not shunned. I think our industry is lessened when people
| shun people making stuff for their own reasons. I really like
| doing this, and I think you should try it to, if you're on
| the fence! :P ;) xx
| andersource wrote:
| > I think to a large extent coding can be like making art.
|
| That resonates very strongly with me.
|
| > I enjoyed doing it. People don't seem to think that's
| good enough.
|
| Yeah, I've found that a lot of times when you want to show
| something you've made to someone, they'll automatically
| expect it to be useful and judge it from that perspective.
| Perhaps that would be different if we could frame it in a
| way that from the beginning helps align expectations?
| graderjs wrote:
| > Perhaps that would be different if we could frame it in
| a way that from the beginning helps align expectations?
|
| It might, but I just want to put it out there sometimes.
| I don't want to have to explain it, or limit its
| appreciation to whatever I say it is. I like to leave it
| open for people to interpret. Sure, when you go to a
| gallery, sometimes there's a little card that "explains"
| the art work. But sometimes not. I guess I like the
| freedom of just creating things and letting people
| interpret them. I don't want to do that all the time,
| explain it, but I do it sometimes. So I suppose I'm
| pushing the task onto the consumers of the work to work
| out what it means for them, rather than me to explain it.
| And seeing well are people going to be open to that or
| not. Whatever their reaction, it's okay either way. I
| just want the freedom myself to explain it when I want
| and not when I want, but on a basic level both are
| equally valid.
| beckingz wrote:
| This is a nice butterfly.
|
| How was it made?
| andersource wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| First I'm generating the general geometry of the wings -
| the most basic shape is a "teardrop" / half of the infinity
| symbol (see this[0]). Then they are scaled and rotated
| randomly (within a range to match the other parts of the
| wings), and further perturbed to make the shape more
| random. Then I'm drawing lines from the "tip" of the
| teardrop to the edges and using them to color the segments.
| The final result is rendered with Three.js[1].
|
| Obviously this is a very succinct explanation, it took me
| quite some work. You're welcome to look at the code[2],
| though it's quite messy :)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemniscate_of_Gerono
|
| [1] https://threejs.org/
|
| [2] https://github.com/andersource/andersource.github.io/bl
| ob/ma...
| beckingz wrote:
| That's quite a lot of code! I wasn't expecting to see a
| linear interpellation function, but that would explain
| how smooth it looks.
| pdm55 wrote:
| I moved my cursor pointer around the screen and hoped it
| would follow.
| andersource wrote:
| That's a great idea!
| Folcon wrote:
| This is beautiful, I really don't understand people who don't
| see the value in creating beautiful or interesting things.
|
| I can understand not wanting to do it, it takes a fair bit of
| time and energy that only comes with a fair bit of passion on
| the part of the creator, but not understanding why people
| would just want to make things? That's fairly alien to me
| =)...
|
| I'd echo seanwilson and ask that you look at flocking, but
| also more general boid behaviours[0], small herds of these
| butterflies flying together in a space would look very cool
| =)...
|
| - [0]: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
| andersource wrote:
| Thanks so much! Yeah that idea is really itchy now :)
|
| I guess some people don't see (at least immediately) the
| artistic value in such things, and then it seems rather
| pointless.
| lasfter wrote:
| These are beautiful! And I second the other comment asking
| how it works. A good candidate for a blog post if you're
| looking for a more appreciative audience than your coworkers.
| andersource wrote:
| Thank you, I thought of writing one, this might give me the
| motivation to finally do it!
| ajxs wrote:
| That's very cool! I should probably have added to the
| original comment that in the cases where it's been my role to
| interview potential candidates for a position, these kind of
| projects are the first thing I look for. I'd much rather work
| with people who are fundamentally passionate about what they
| do.
| andersource wrote:
| Thanks, and that's great! Due to experiences like the above
| I would probably not even think of bringing this up in a
| regular interview, unless I get the vibe that the
| interviewer might actually find it interesting for its own
| sake (which isn't that easy - turns out I have a terrible
| intuition for which people would appreciate something like
| that).
| forty wrote:
| If you can afford choosing your employer, this is a good test.
| Who wants to work with people that wouldn't be enthousiastic
| about such cool hobby projects? :)
| mrwoggle wrote:
| A lot of game developers have written a 'toy' game engine. A
| lot of embedded developers have written their own little OS. A
| lot of web developers have written a 'click this button to
| autogenerate web pages' tool. And so on.
|
| Face it. You are just not that hot. Another X Compiler for Y.
| Great. Probably doesn't really work. Senior devs probably care
| more about that you can finish boring project or stack. Spend
| hours on some tiny thing and make it work.
|
| It probably also depends on how you present those hobby
| projects. Instead of saying "Look, I am so cool!", you can say
| you use this as a means to become a better programmer.
| kharak wrote:
| You've already got a bunch of replies, still like to add
| something. I'm in the "I never felt anything towards coding"
| category. Tried to grow passion for it, just doesn't work. But
| I'd still be thrilled (and possibly intimidated) to see a
| passionate developer showing up for an interview. That these
| interviewers didn't get that you have _passion_ for the work
| itself and not its outcome, not a great sign.
|
| Hope you found something more fitting for your personality.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Thanks: I'm now changing my interview process. If the company
| doesn't "get it", if they don't understand why _having fun
| programming_ doesn't make me a better programmer, it's time to
| leave.
|
| A hobby OS kernel sounds effing amazing and super cool. I've
| also written an assembler and interpreter (8051 variant), which
| was mind-bending in a great way. Thanks for posting!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I don't know, if I were in a position of hiring programmers
| I'd be a little suspicious of how much they do it for fun. I
| don't want people who base their choices of language,
| libraries, frameworks or whatever at work on what is fun or
| interesting to them. I think I'd want to see them have fun
| creating something for which programming was a means to an
| ends more than the fun part itself.
| markb139 wrote:
| If I'd have been interviewing you we'd have talked about those
| two projects a lot. Especially the OS kernel :)
|
| I currently have two hobby projects "in development". An bot
| trader (it broke even over 6 months with pretend money).
|
| And a logic analyser using a Raspberry Pi Pico board and the
| excellent sigrok software - this project took a baby step to
| being non hobby when another dev found it and raised some
| issues.
|
| Don't stop with the hobby projects
| jmfldn wrote:
| That's really tragic that people think like this. Not
| everything needs a "purpose", in fact many of the most
| beautiful things in life don't. Doing things for the intrinsic
| joy rather than for some end is a key to life actually imho.
| Those who must always do things with some future goal in mind,
| getting more money, power, stuff, prestige etc are missing out.
|
| Ironically, tinkering for fun can lead to innovation. Many
| cases of this in maths, science and engineering.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > "Is this going to make you any money?"
|
| "Yes, by motivating you to hire me"
|
| Seriously, did they expect new hires to be working on their
| startup on the side?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| A perfect employee is someone who has all the skills
| necessary to build a successful company... but for some
| reason decided to build one for you, instead of for
| himself/herself.
| avgDev wrote:
| I just want to say that I am the person that doesn't like doing
| anything unless it creates value. I am just wired differently.
| For me a useless project is a waste of time unless I'm trying
| to learn something new, and even then I try to find something
| that is going to be useful because otherwise I lose interest.
|
| I don't know what it is. Maybe because I grew up relatively
| poor?
|
| I also love programming but mostly when it solves an issue for
| a business. There is nothing better in the world as far as
| careers go. When I can make $150 an hour and create so much
| value for a business that they will gladly give me their money,
| its special.
|
| In general I have hard time just relaxing, I prefer to do and
| build things around the house.
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| I totally understand that whether you were offered the position
| or not isn't the key take away of the story.... But for the
| sake of my own wondering, did they offer you the position?
| ajxs wrote:
| In this case I wasn't offered a position. The company in
| question is well known within a certain field, and has a
| reputation for having a difficult recruitment process. They
| were offering a very competitive salary, and I was admittedly
| excited at the prospect of working for a company with this
| kind of elite reputation. This was the final stage of the
| interview process. I had passed the technical challenges and
| initial interview. In the end, I was able to walk away from
| this experience with my pride mostly intact.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Sadly, some recruiters are looking for a cog to fill a specific
| hole, and they do not want someone more experienced or better
| than what they're looking for (ie. they dont want the Einstein,
| they just want a math teacher). The salary would also reflect
| that they are specifically looking for a _cog_. It 's best that
| you didn't get that position.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I disagree - they didn't ask GP because they wanted to gauge
| their interest in programing - they asked that question
| because they wanted to figure out what kind of colleague they
| would be, and if their experiences _would mark them as more
| suitable for role compared to other candidates._ GP 's answer
| was probably from the left field (for them) - put yourself in
| their shoes: how would you gain insight into gauging their
| suitability for "cog" work based on completely unrelated
| hobbies?
|
| Always keep this in mind at the back of your mind when
| interviewing - your answers have to relate to the job you're
| interviewing for in some shape or form, hopefully in a good
| way. I'm guessing the interview wasn't at a kernel, embedded
| devices or compiler companies - those would have dug into
| GP's projects in detail, with enthusiasm. GP would still be
| cog there, obviously.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _put yourself in their shoes: how would you gain insight
| into gauging their suitability for "cog" work based on
| completely unrelated hobbies?_
|
| This is the core disagreement though: to 'ajxs, me, and
| many other commenters here, these _aren 't unrelated
| hobbies_. Software engineering can't be neatly demarked
| along the lines of programming languages or frameworks.
| These are just the tip of an iceberg (and most of them are
| just flavors of the same thing, solving the same underlying
| problems).
|
| You don't _just_ write a OS kernel and become experienced
| in kernel development. These kinds of projects, done on the
| side, with no deadline pressure forcing you to do a half-
| assed, minimum-effort job, allow you to gain more
| generalized, holistic understanding, that 's very much
| transferable into just about any kind of programming job
| you could do.
|
| > _your answers have to relate to the job you 're
| interviewing for in some shape or form, hopefully in a good
| way_
|
| That's a very good point. Myself, when talking about my
| seemingly unrelated side projects, I consider it my
| responsibility to show how they connect to their domain and
| skills they look for.
| ajxs wrote:
| There's a lot of truth in this comment. Being able to gauge
| the interest of the people you're presenting to, and
| adjusting accordingly, is obviously going to benefit you in
| any situation too. It's a good idea to focus on keeping
| things relevant. In my defense, in this case the
| instructions were very open ended. They wanted projects I
| was particularly proud of, and left the scope very wide.
|
| Regarding gauging my suitability for "cog" work: Without
| wanting to sound arrogant, I don't think it's really that
| remarkable a feat to memorise the semantics of modern
| enterprise tools (maybe only a great feat of patience). I
| can't imagine why anyone would want to hear about all the
| ORMs I've used, or what Java/Python/Node/<insert tech here>
| libraries I've used over the years. That stuff is already
| in my resume. I think it's probably a better wager to risk
| boring the person looking to hear all about which new Java
| features you've used, rather than to risk boring the
| interviewer looking for genuinely interesting passion
| projects.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Regarding gauging my suitability for "cog" work:
| Without wanting to sound arrogant, I don't think it's
| really that remarkable a feat to memorise the semantics
| of modern enterprise tools
|
| That is not arrogant at all. However, I think there is
| room for pride in enterprise projects beyond memorizing
| specific libs. You can be proud of turning out a solution
| under pressure, or solving a seemingly-intractable
| problem creatively, or even a technically simple solution
| that improved your/user's lives. One of the most high-
| impact things I've done in my career was to implement a
| CSV export feature in an afternoon, without being
| prompted, saving my colleagues many hours of work per
| week - they were _delighted_ and I 'm yet to tip that.
|
| Interviewers are not always looking to be dazzled by
| technical brilliance (which is a plus), but you can show
| many other attributes: grit, patience, creativity,
| curiosity. I think your side-projects exhibit all 4
| attributes, but interviewers are fallible, and it's your
| role to figure out which attributes are desirable for the
| role and weave them into your answers.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think your initial approach is a brilliant way to interview a
| company to see it they're "your kind of people". If they have
| no interest in creative inventions or fresh ideas, run for the
| hills. You'll never be happy there.
| guerrilla wrote:
| That's funny, I had the inverse interaction of someone telling
| me all theh wanted to do was be useful and I just could not
| relate. Like you, I do it because I like it.
| herval wrote:
| I feel changes a lot between locations ("scenes"). Back when I
| lived in Berlin, we had entire meetups dedicated to talk about
| _useless but cool projects_. Moved to the Bay Area, and I could
| never find anything remotely similar. Maybe they exist, I just
| couldn't find one.
|
| I also experienced the same interviewing experience you had,
| many times: my "talk about something interesting you made"
| answer used to be "I made a twitter bot that makes poetry with
| ML and I spent months training it" - it always got radically
| different reactions, from blank stares to "why didn't you use
| those to mine bitcoin?"
| zygy wrote:
| http://www.stupidhackathon.com/
| suifbwish wrote:
| A good portion of the population would have no idea
| whatsoever to do with themselves if money ever becomes
| unnecessary for society to function. This is why so many
| people who suddenly become rich are prone to drug abuse and
| increased suicide risk. Some people are only able to see what
| they were taught.
| ogou wrote:
| I had the same experience when I moved back to the Bay Area.
| I made a serious effort to find meetups and connect with
| hacker spaces, etc. Most of them were veiled product pitches
| or fishing for developers to hire. Also, some of the meetups
| had people obviously looking for ideas to take. Really turned
| off by all of it and quit going out. When even TechShop went
| bankrupt I realized that the "scene" was long gone.
|
| All the eccentrics and wizards seem to be gone. It's all just
| crass transactional factory workers. Last contract I was
| surrounded by people who talked about the entire line of Audi
| and BMW sedans, but had zero interest in any ideas.
| SiVal wrote:
| _I feel changes a lot between locations_
|
| A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us
| who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were
| typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable
| segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy,
| homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions,
| etc.
|
| Meetups like the West Coast Computer Faire, little shops like
| Weird Stuff, amateur radio "hamfests", astronomy clubs, and
| so on were everywhere. Programmers knew how to use soldering
| irons and slide rules. Tech companies were rounding errors
| compared to, say, car companies.
|
| But the intellectual fashion enforcers with wealth and power
| that tech companies are now, with tools to make society
| submit to their will are not the culture we were. Like Wall
| Street before them, they have bigger plans than ordinary,
| little people with their quaint hobbies. So even though we
| pocket protector and slide rule types still exist and can
| form a quorum online, the in-person meetings mostly (not
| entirely but mostly) vanished back in the dot-com mania.
| agent008t wrote:
| I really feel this. At some point, all those hobbies became
| metrics to optimize for monetary gain, things to put on a
| cv. Somehow that seems to have changed everything.
| huachimingo wrote:
| There is this modern phylosopher, Byung-Chul Han[0], who
| talks about this and similar stuff on his essays and
| books. You could read him on a weekend, his books are
| short. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han
| valand wrote:
| In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not
| being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel
| programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff.
|
| Those things are exciting to me. But I notice my work
| colleagues, especially the ones from newer generations and
| those working more on high level stuffs, are rarely
| interested in these computational/communication device
| hobby thingies at the fundamental levels. They are more
| interested in what to make out of them rather than what are
| they made of.
| SiVal wrote:
| _I always found myself feeling like a fake..._
|
| No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how
| skilled.
|
| _These things are exciting to me_
|
| And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say,
| "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide
| rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things,
| would get together with friends at an astronomy club
| meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough
| comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide
| rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!",
| even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for
| you and do it better. Yes, but how can _I_ do this magic
| myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who
| wanted these other skills but didn 't necessarily have
| them.
|
| I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm",
| discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show
| me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little
| silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly,
| there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd
| both hear that someone had just picked up a
| communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox
| receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in
| it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't
| NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but _look at this_!
| We 're picking up a signal from SPACE!
| world_peace42 wrote:
| Bizarre this was downvoted.
| ehnto wrote:
| There are plenty of people from both groups in their
| comment who participate in HN. It's not too surprising,
| he was not too kind.
|
| It's the tyranny of the internet, the bigger a group of
| people the harder it is to keep everyone happy and in
| agreeance, and not tread on any toes. Disagreement isn't
| the end of the world though.
| shaan7 wrote:
| > A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of
| us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area
| were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an
| unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham
| radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction,
| math competitions, etc.
|
| Dammit. So this is not something I merely suspected but is
| really true. I grew up around the year 2000 and programming
| was all I could think about, I read about people/meetups
| you describe and was eager to be a part of them.
|
| By the time I grew up, attended university and started a
| job, things seemed very different. The stuff that got me
| excited about programming are now considered "boring" or
| "legacy".
|
| Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like
| doing and do what is considered amazing now (AI etc) even
| though you don't find it fun :/
| auto wrote:
| > Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like
| doing
|
| Absolutely not. All these things people are talking about
| in this thread are still out there, you just have to keep
| looking. Posts show up on HN occasionally that hint at
| it, but one of my favorite places to go browse when I
| need a hit of that passion project ecosystem is
| hackaday.com.
|
| There are so many people out there doing cool stuff just
| to do it, especially given the fact that everything is
| literally orders of magnitude more accessible than it was
| even 10 years ago when you consider resources like
| YouTube, and the race to the bottom on cost of things
| like Arduinos, 3D printing, etc.
|
| If this does circle back to finding a job, then that's a
| matter of finding the right fits. I got my first job out
| of college writing iOS apps for motorcoach bus schedules
| by showing the company a game I released on the app
| store, and my most recent position for a Senior iOS dev
| (which has translated to a firmware position), I spent
| most of my interview talking about my homebrew synth
| project: https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI
|
| There are people out there who will be interested, and
| they also happen to be people who hire people! I show my
| coworkers my side projects all the time, sometimes
| they're somewhat relevant to what we do, sometimes they
| don't relate at all.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I stayed all my life at the same location, and I noticed
| the change between the times, too.
|
| My guess is that this is because of different motivations
| people had to learn computer programming. Did you learn
| programming because making simple programs in Basic was
| irresistibly fascinating? Or did you learn programming
| because people told you that this was how you could make
| a lot of money? Of course the former type of software
| developer is more likely to play with "useless" (i.e. not
| immediately profitable) stuff than the latter.
|
| When I was a kid, personal computers existed, but they
| were mere toys. It was not obvious that something like
| today's IT industry will exist one day. Therefore, only
| nerds played with personal computers. And the first IT
| companies were full of nerds, because those were the only
| people who knew how to write code.
|
| When it became obvious that IT jobs are well paid and the
| demand for programmers is large, people motivated mostly
| by money started studying computer science, too. These
| days they probably are a majority at most workplaces.
|
| Nerds had their moment in the spotlight, now they are
| being displaced by normies. Being fascinated by tech for
| tech's sake is uncool again. It is cool to be fascinated
| by tech for money's sake, though.
|
| By firing James Damore, even Google made it official that
| people on the autistic spectrum are no longer welcome.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Related is the common misconception that the well-known
| tech companies, corporations and startups alike, are part
| of that same "nerd" scene you mention. They aren't. They're
| just another flavor of business, and the people running
| them are just businessmen.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| That's almost like making a website for people who dream
| about making big money managing an IT company, and
| calling it "hacker news".
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| Nothing is useless. Either you are learning something or teach
| yourself not to make that in the future as a business :)
| legerdemain wrote:
| A lot of people who insist on building only stuff they can sell
| have very little business sense. They rarely seem to know if what
| they're building has any real chance of making money. As a
| result, they end up building a lot of stuff that's both useless
| _and_ boring.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| The biggest reason to make useless stuff instead of useful stuff
| is to avoid harassment. If you have something useful on GitHub
| then entitled users will come out of the woodwork to request
| features, report "bugs" (read: the user is doing something
| wrong), or otherwise expect free work out of you.
| dheera wrote:
| Let them know they are free to make a pull request? I don't see
| this as a reason to specifically avoid useful stuff.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That's precisely the point. They _aren 't_ free to make a
| pull request. A pull request puts a time demand on the
| project owner to review and merge the patch.
|
| What they are free to do is fork the project, and do whatever
| the hell they want to in the fork.
| ratww wrote:
| Yep. It's a cathedral rather than a bazaar [1]. A very
| small cathedral, but still one.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
| salmo wrote:
| My biggest reason is that I don't have to finish. When I get
| bored with it, I move on.
|
| I used to put pressure on myself to "finish" and would often
| miss and feel guilty. Not just computer projects, but
| electronics, learning musical instruments, etc.
|
| Then I realized I was making my hobbies work and doing it
| badly. Real work (where I have to finish) got in the way of my
| hobbies. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, relaxing, and
| rewarding. What was I doing?
|
| I gave up the pressure and it was liberating. I pick up the
| guitar for a couple months, then get lost in trying to make
| analog circuits. I tinker in the garden then teach myself
| enough CAD to do a small woodworking project. I started sewing
| masks and tote bags then set it aside. I fish a bunch in the
| spring and fall. Then, I'll revisit them later when the muse
| hits and don't feel like I wasted money.
|
| Now my only goals are to have some fun, relax, and learn
| something new.
|
| I really only program for fun in languages I don't know or
| platforms I haven't played with. I learn by picking up a
| project that scratches an itch.
|
| Sometimes those feed back into my work (eg Go, Kotlin), but
| most don't (various LISPs, low level C).
|
| My issues are exacerbated by my ADHD, but I would recommend the
| approach to anyone with a steady job they enjoy. That and not
| using TV/movies as a hobby. There's just so much cool stuff to
| explore.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Yeah learning things is so fun, and also so is just having a
| bunch of weird skills you're competent or at least
| knowledgeable at.
|
| I won't post my list of accumulated learnings because it's
| about as good a personal identifier as my SSN. But it's
| similarly scattered as yours and I love them all even the
| ones I haven't used in years.
|
| It's really become the way I orient my life. What bizarre or
| useful thing I'll get into next is always the big question
| now.
| toast0 wrote:
| I haven't gotten any feedback on my github stuff (which isn't
| quite useless, just not useful to many), but it's pretty easy
| to ignore feedback in general, and it's not too hard to turn
| off issues; not sure if you can turn off pull requests though.
| watwut wrote:
| Wasn't really my experience. Besides, github have tons of
| useful smaller projects that either don't have any issues filed
| by strangers or have them while author happily ignores
| those.You have make something pretty big to have big enough
| community for it to cause issues.
|
| And if that really bothers you, you can turn off issues in
| github.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is one of the downsides of programming-as-a-art: if you
| create paintings you may get feedback and requests for more (or
| less) - but you're unlikely to get bug reports.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Try making actual art with programming, eg demoscene or
| quirky twitter bots or programs that automously paint
| paintings, and you'll get way fewer bug reports.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| I would image that satisfaction I'd get from having people
| actually use my code would greatly outweigh the inconvenience
| of being pestered about new features.
| jcfields wrote:
| There's definitely something uniquely satisfying about
| knowing that code you wrote is saving other people time or
| helping them create things. The beautiful thing about
| programming is you can solve a problem once for yourself and
| also end up end up solving it forever for everybody.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I'd imagine that it is satisfying, yes. But I think you may
| be underestimating how little other people will value your
| time in asking for help using that software. I have a
| colleague that maintains a popular open source project, and
| he spends a ridiculous amount of time answering questions
| about problems they're having, and very often those problems
| don't have anything to do with the software he's written, but
| the competence of the questioner. I had been considering
| developing a package, perhaps paid for with grant money, but
| the long term commitment that comes with it has scared me
| off.
| djoldman wrote:
| I wonder why people are so annoyed or upset by this.
|
| If you don't want to support an arch/language/platform, etc.
| just say so in the readme (all arch/languages/platforms besides
| ____ are unsupported.
|
| People expecting things are pretty par for the course on the
| internet... Just be firm and curt. Close the issues quickly and
| refer to them if reopened.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| People are annoyed because when your project gets big enough
| (or if you're just unlucky), _that doesn 't stop them_.
| djoldman wrote:
| Is it possible to ban users from posting issues on GitHub
| to your project?
| benrbray wrote:
| You can turn off the "issues" tab in your GitHub
| repository via Repo Settings > Options > Features >
| Issues.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Then they go and search for your email address in your
| commits. Some of these people are really persistent.
| teraflop wrote:
| If individual users are being persistent and causing
| problems, you can ban them. But if your problem is caused
| by a large number of different users, each coming across
| the project for the first time and creating annoying
| issues/PRs, banning doesn't help.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Or just ignore them. Don't engage with the message either
| physically as in typing a response, or even just mentally.
| Skim and move on.
|
| That people send unwanted messages on the internet is the
| most common complaint I see regarding the internet that I
| just cant empathise with at all. I just really dont get it.
| Possibly has something to do with my first couple years
| online involving 4chan.
| nicbou wrote:
| Offer them a refund
| valbaca wrote:
| Or use the trick from Java Puzzlers (which may have borrowed
| it from another source):
|
| Feel free to mail us your feedback written in pencil on a $20
| bill.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > which may have borrowed it from another source
|
| Probably Car Talk. Iirc they instructed that puzzler
| answers be written on the back of a $20 bill also. It was a
| great radio show!
| jraph wrote:
| That is an excellent idea. I hope I'll never have to do that
| (haven't had to deal with this kind of thing so far), but
| I'll definitely try this should an entitled user show up in
| the future.
| epmaybe wrote:
| I laughed at this one, thank you for that
| [deleted]
| yannoninator wrote:
| > If you have something useful on GitHub...
|
| make the repo private or close contributions then?
|
| if it's going to be useless and only be used by yourself, you
| might as well blog about it and move onto the next useless
| project.
|
| hell, there may be no need to place it on github for these sort
| of projects.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I would suggest you may not be the right person to use code
| in these repos.
|
| For someone like me sometimes I'm looking for a small sample
| of code that fits a pattern. I could careless about the
| project. Sometimes you need an odd piece.
|
| Saying his code doesn't belong on github tells me you might
| not belong on github.
| yannoninator wrote:
| > Saying his code doesn't belong on github tells me you
| might not belong on github.
|
| you're right, most of these 'unpolished' projects can go on
| gitlab, bitbucket or another git hosting solution instead.
| ratww wrote:
| Terrible advice from an educational perspective.
|
| I use Github all the time to find code samples, especially
| for 3D stuff, shaders, audio, emulation, demoscene... It's
| more common to find solutions to my problems in zero-star
| projects than in big ones.
|
| Lots of people star my code-as-art experiments too, and from
| the forks I can see they find educational value in it.
|
| Not everything in the world has to fit perfectly into some
| preconceived mold. Heck, in that case, the most
| interesting/educational things are trying to avoid that.
| yannoninator wrote:
| throw it on gitlab then?
| ratww wrote:
| How about no?
| yannoninator wrote:
| yes, since this works for most useless projects, I know a
| developer that uses gitlab for this purpose.
|
| works well and you can self host it you should try it!
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Anyone who thinks github code should be polished and
| supported or hidden from view is going to be sorely
| disappointed in my island of misfit experiments, but I really
| couldn't care less. I didn't put it on github for fame,
| exposure, or resume fodder, I put it there because they host
| my repos for free.
| david_allison wrote:
| Someone might find value in it.
|
| An unmaintained[0] badge feels like a better solution
| compared to not publishing it
|
| [0] https://github.com/potch/unmaintained.tech
| purrplexed wrote:
| gatekeeping github... classic
|
| agree with the others here. github isn't some place where
| only published packages go.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I remember when I was in college and told my friend that I just
| spent a sizeable (for a student) amount of money on an electric
| guitar and couldn't be happier.
|
| His reply was: so, how are you planning on making that money back
| with it?
|
| I had no reply to that.
|
| There are people who, as zombie fiction for teenage audiences
| author Jonathan Maberry put it "think like insects" - they have
| but one overriding goal in life: maximize their total wealth.
|
| This is an approach to life so foreign to me yet so often
| rewarded that it makes me wonder who's really happier.
|
| One thing I know is that I hate working with such people -
| reading their code feels like listening to muzak - it works, but
| there doesn't seem to be any actual thought or design behind it.
| Long term it becomes unmaintainable, but that usually doesn't
| matter much, because projects get rewritten all the time.
| magpi3 wrote:
| The main takeaway from the article is an old one: play and
| learning are very closely related and perhaps our instincts for
| play have been honed by the evolutionary benefits of that
| relationship.
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