[HN Gopher] The blissful Zen of a good side project
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The blissful Zen of a good side project
Author : ingve
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-04-04 20:37 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joshcollinsworth.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joshcollinsworth.com)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved
| my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things
| the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech
| debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I
| invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club
| zen at work.
| bashmelek wrote:
| Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your
| own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from
| scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever
| rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a
| sanctuary
| cheschire wrote:
| My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received
| an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi
| network onto my router so that their cell customers would get
| more wifi coverage or something.
|
| So I ordered a DOCSIS 3.1 modem off amazon, then went and
| rummaged around in my storage box for an old 2013 macbook air,
| installed ubuntu server on it, and finally learned how to setup a
| home router with DHCP, DNS, NAT, firewall, etc. Pihole was a lot
| of that, and I installed it as a docker container so that was a
| fun thing to learn to manage as well.
|
| As an aside, ChatGPT made most of this possible. I have used *nix
| off and on for 25 years but haven't done serious system
| administration in at least 15 years. ChatGPT is definitely the
| crutch I needed to get off my ass and do more side projects.
| pitched wrote:
| As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a
| crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone
| call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that
| cheschire wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home
| assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code
| for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my
| outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring
| up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general
| concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32,
| getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and...
|
| So yeah, it enables my brain to just chase the inspiration
| rabbit without getting too bogged down in infrastructure.
| nidnogg wrote:
| I've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well. A
| lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB
| piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.
|
| I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and
| then
| Willingham wrote:
| -Written by human, not AI
|
| Love that you added this to the footer on your website. Goodbye
| 'organic' and 'non-GMO' and hello 'AI-Free' XD
| Cyphase wrote:
| That badge is from Not By AI: https://notbyai.fyi/about
| indemnity wrote:
| My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours
| long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation
| writing, and 10% of the time, if I'm lucky, a little bit of code.
| It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my
| sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three
| months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form
| factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).
|
| - Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my
| environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS
| development machines
|
| - Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io
| with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin
| UI (learning React/Vite)
|
| - Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing
| wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home
| network performance
|
| - Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up
| my learning and get me unblocked when working on something
| unfamiliar The freedom to over engineer the shit out of
| something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to
| compromise a lot in my day job!
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| I love this.
|
| My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my
| "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices,
| efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative
| itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What
| would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can
| I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it
| doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?
|
| Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill
| acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't
| anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I
| think: non-goal oriented growth.
| annjose wrote:
| This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the
| path. No pressure, no goal -- just the joy of building for its
| own sake.
|
| These two lines really hit home:
|
| > You don't have to listen to any other voices here, except that
| quiet one inside of you that's gently urging you to do the thing
| you know you need to do.
|
| > You don't need to know where it's going to lead. For that
| matter, it doesn't have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to
| come of it.
|
| That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right
| (to me).
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