[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 : 492 points
Date : 2025-04-04 20:37 UTC (1 days 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
| Shorn wrote:
| You can tell my engagement level with my job by the commit
| frequency on my side-project.
|
| If I'm deeply engaged at work, I don't have many spare cycles
| out of hours and there's little happening - library updates
| and small fiddling.
|
| Otherwise - it's full steam ahead on projects that I somehow
| magically find the time for.
|
| I don't work on my stuff during work hours - disengagement
| from work results in more energy and motivation to do stuff
| out of hours.
|
| Weirdly, I think this actually benefits those boring
| workplaces too. If I'm scratching the itch with what I'm
| doing on my side-project - it means I'm less likely to invent
| interesting new ways to over-complicate things at work.
| 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.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Shout out to all those generous souls who posted how-to's
| and project notes for their IoT projects, so that machines
| could learn from them.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| RIP to those generous souls
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Why would it be obviously ridiculous if it granted the parent
| commenter so much productivity?
|
| Perhaps the same obvious ridiculousness that manual agrarians
| passed upon the tractor.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| Vibe coding is not using a chat interface to explore an
| unfamiliar domain like GP describes, it's letting an agent
| tool like Cursor or Goose do most of the work semi-
| independently.
| Cyphase wrote:
| Vibe coding is not looking at the code, essentially. See
| what Simon Willison has written about it (the original
| term was coined[0] by Andrej Karpathy):
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
|
| [0] Only two months ago!
| 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
| philsnow wrote:
| A million years ago (in the age of "made in Dreamweaver" badges
| on web sites) I had a dumb little ball-and-stick image of
| adenosine triphosphate and I made a dumb little "made with ATP"
| badge, because I typed out html with plain-vanilla vim.
| 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!
| esperent wrote:
| > Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop
| PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)
|
| I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but
| whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a
| SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.
|
| How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the
| temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?
| indemnity wrote:
| Final assembly was recent, but it took months of planning and
| research, mainly around being sure the components would fit
| in the tight tolerances of the FormD 2.1 9.95L case.
|
| I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its
| challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what
| screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the
| ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up
| _around_ the GPU. For the first build, it took me probably a
| full day, but now I can strip and rebuild it in around an
| hour or two.
|
| Also, the case - I had my heart set on the 2.1 case not the
| 2.5, since the 2.1 was a labor of love from the OG designer -
| It took freaking months to get my hands on the Titanium +
| Black version. My recommendation would be to favorite it on
| the Shopify store, and hit order the second you get the back
| in stock notification, they sell out in an hour or two.
|
| I still screwed up my planning and had to get my custom
| cables remade to be shorter to give me more space, and had to
| deshroud my GPU to make it fit at the same time as the I/O
| headers.
|
| I ordered both an air cooler and the AIO I now use, and tried
| both, in the end, I went for the AIO (accepting the higher
| GPU temps due to the radiator at the top), because I don't
| game as much and I want the 9950X3D to not throttle when
| doing Rust builds and other things that peg all cores at 100,
| and I didn't want to undervolt.
|
| I can run the 4090 at full power, the PSU I have does
| amazingly well (Corsair SF750 SFX). However, I am switching
| it out for an SF1000 SFX soon, to give it a little more
| headroom, if I max out the CPU (170W TDP) and GPU (450W TDP),
| along with the other components, I am approaching the limits
| of the SF750, and it definitely couldn't handle a 5090 (a
| future project!).
|
| Temperature wise, the 4090 maxes out at 60-70C for the games
| I play, and the CPU maxes out at around 80C for all-core
| workloads, idling at around 50C.
|
| Not as good as a big ass desktop, but I came from a big ass
| desktop and I love this tiny dense powerhouse that is 6x
| smaller than my Fractal North XL predecessor :)
|
| Photo (Logitech MX Master mouse for scale):
| https://imgur.com/a/lcS98IE
|
| Best resources for this was the /r/FormD and /r/sffpc
| subreddits and Discord.
|
| Parts list:
|
| - CPU: AMD 9950X3D (originally a spare 7800X3D, 9950X3D was a
| recent swap-out)
|
| - GPU: MSI Ventus 3X RTX 4090
|
| - Motherboard: ASUS ROG X870-I (originally X670E-I)
|
| - Memory: G-Skill Trident Z CL30 DDR6000 32GB (x2)
|
| - SSD: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (x2)
|
| - PSU: Corsair SF750
|
| - Cooling Option 1 (not used): Thermalright AXP90-X47 (Full
| Copper)
|
| - Cooling Option 2: CoolerMaster Atmos 240 AIO
|
| - Custom cabling: Ordered from DreambigbyRayMOD on Etsy
|
| - GPU deshrouding kit: Ordered from Osserva on Etsy
|
| - Fans: All Noctua for quieter noise profiles
|
| - Case: FormD T1 2.1 Titanium + CNC machined black side
| panels
| esperent wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, I'm gonna save this comment and come
| back to it. I'm in Vietnam and chose this case partly
| because it seems resellers do have it in stock here. It's
| all the other stuff - custom risers and cables - I'm
| worried about.
|
| I'm gonna target a 4080/5080 - stuck with Nvidia because
| CUDA - which gives me a lot more wiggle room with the power
| supply.
|
| I've built plenty of PCs, including a few SFF PCs without
| GPUs, but never something requiring this kind of
| customization so I'm planning to find a detailed build
| online and mostly copy what the other person did, if
| possible.
| indemnity wrote:
| If you go for the 4080 or 5080, you will have a lot more
| options for sure. If you can find one, I would try get a
| 2/2.5 slot wide card, gives you so much more flexibility.
|
| Bookmark this Excel, saves you a lot of time looking up
| specs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AddRvGWJ_f
| 4B6UC7_Ift...
|
| You want a GPU no longer than 325mm (though exactly 325mm
| may be pushing it).
|
| For the 4090 it was basically Founder's Edition or my
| card. FE was impossible to source (I am not in the USA),
| and I had to get the MSI card specially ordered in, the
| most common card was the ASUS ROG monster which at 357mm
| would never fit.
|
| At 322mm, the MSI card barely fits (after deshrouding),
| there is like 2-3mm to spare length-wise. And you have to
| build in 3 slot mode if you want any clearance from the
| PSU (mount PSU on standoffs).
|
| Before deshrouding, the GPU plastic covers mean you can't
| also plug in the USB-C I/O port.
|
| Oh yeah, forgot about the riser cable.
|
| The one that comes with the FormD case is serviceable,
| but depending on the motherboard. I believe it has issues
| with Gigabyte B760 and B650 motherboards.
|
| I also have the LinkUp 19mm PCIe 5.0 V2 riser cable
| (https://linkup.one/linkup-ava5-pcie-5-0-riser-cable-
| future-p...), but it can only be used in air-cooled
| builds - it has a red tab at the top which blocks the
| radiator if you want to use it with watercooled/AIOs. See
| this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/1f5i
| j02/question_re_.... Some brave souls have hacked off the
| tab with a knife/scissors but you have to be careful not
| to cut the wires along with it :)
|
| So I had to go back to the stock cable for the AIO flavor
| build, which has other issues (you have to fold it/squash
| it a bit at the bottom where it bends around below the
| motherboard, so that pressure on it doesn't cause it to
| make it pop out of the motherboard connector). Before you
| put on the bottom cover with the feet on it, the riser
| will touch the surface of whatever you are building on,
| and given enough time can cause the motherboard connector
| to loosen or pop out.
|
| Had hours of debugging fun trying to figure out why it
| was starting to lock up while gaming, turned out to be
| the riser having wiggled loose from the motherboard.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Whoa. All that since Jan 1? Inspiring!
| indemnity wrote:
| The PC build took months of planning, but yeah, I've been on
| a tear since the December break!
| 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.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| I agree with that last bit - sometimes you gotta drop the time
| associated with polish of a finished product and play around.
|
| Always stuck with me that pretty much every famous piece of art
| has a long backlog of practice to get to that point.
| 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).
| bbkane wrote:
| I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then
| rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it
| again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting
| until I'm happy.
|
| At work they rely on me to deliver in a reasonable time, and move
| on to the next task. Once something is working, it generally
| isn't changed too much, even to improve it (obviously if it's
| really important to improve it we make time for that, but that
| doesn't happen so often)
| m463 wrote:
| I think it's nice to be able to write something well, polished
| and sturdy. Something better than at work. higher ideals.
|
| Or, to write something that is house of cards nonsense that
| would never fly at work but does something fun. You don't have
| to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is the BEST.
| bbkane wrote:
| Oh absolutely, the real win is being able to play with a
| concept with no risk
| iamben wrote:
| I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I
| very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.
|
| A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the time, space
| and money to enjoy side projects again. Music, art, coding for
| the love of making something with no other reason than doing. I
| stopped thinking anything had to _be_ anything - it just _was_. I
| could do for the sake of doing and it was liberating.
|
| I've been very happy about this, it's been a blessing mentally.
| And very productive. I've enjoyed time and space, and I
| appreciate (again!) how lucky I am to be here.
| philip1209 wrote:
| I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search
| for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a
| powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing
| purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]
|
| [1] summary by Gemini
| saulpw wrote:
| Thanks for citing your AI source, it's really much appreciated.
| But having read that book, it can't be properly summarized by
| AI.
| mehphp wrote:
| I had no idea what I was getting into with that book
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the
| last five years, and while I've considered them all successful
| (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having
| addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved
| significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really
| started to take off financially.
|
| I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side
| projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up
| for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be
| sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.
|
| I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it,
| within a year or two I might be able to have enough license
| revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers
| healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful
| Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at
| that point??)
| cafeinux wrote:
| I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months
| ago I started learning something new from an online course.
|
| Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-
| pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it
| as a CSV to import into Anki.
|
| One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with
| weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through
| macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.
|
| This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I
| could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some
| script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.
|
| I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just
| realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side
| project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and
| motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the
| occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and
| I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much.
| And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've
| never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a
| satisfactory experience.
|
| All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty
| hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going
| to be useful for someone other than me.
|
| But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering
| skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking
| from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to
| focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by
| something and I create something for me, and this makes all the
| rest bearable.
| lupire wrote:
| It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you.
| Everything you described automating is something at least
| thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about
| the code quality if it works.
| cafeinux wrote:
| I'm really not sure: it's highly specialized to scrape the
| pages of that particular course and output it in my own HTML
| and CSS classes. Luckily for me, their format is quite
| standard across chapters, but may not be across courses, and
| I didn't write the code to be modular or adaptive given my
| need (and the fact that I'm learning Python, not application
| design).
|
| Still, the code lives in a git repo, so it's not excluded
| that I'll make it evolve to something more generic and
| maintainable in the future. But today, it's my own little
| dirty code that I will jealously keep and hide like that lewd
| drawing I did when I was a teenager.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > I decided to go for Python
|
| Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually
| created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was
| the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of
| the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt +
| Rust & Svelte).
| danvillalon wrote:
| What type of job does sales of Anki decks? I never though
| this to be have like a market, so curious to know
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things
| like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or
| curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as
| N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or
| kanji)
|
| I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except
| on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in
| popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS &
| macOS
|
| My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my
| full-time occupation.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Ah I didn't realize you also had a macOS app out! Also
| cool to see you're on HN! I honestly love the niche that
| we're in.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Hi! Maybe you saw my old app before I rewrote it fully in
| SwiftUI. Yes it's a nice supportive community to be in
| aecsocket wrote:
| Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How
| does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other,
| more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm
| currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm
| curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps
| that people have made.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that
| come to mind:
|
| - Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show
| you which are new to you, and which you have as
| flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in
| a vocab listing
|
| - Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying
| to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards
| passively as you read and encounter them naturally
|
| - Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki
| including AnkiMobile on iOS
|
| - One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from
| starting boundary
|
| - Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and
| soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated
| libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-
| capable tool
|
| I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also
| make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations
| such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB
|
| I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not
| an iOS/macOS app
|
| I should put up some product comparison material as there
| are a lot of tools out there
| joshdavham wrote:
| https://refold.la/category/decks/
| sandbach wrote:
| I like to do this!
|
| Here's one I made for British Sign Language by scraping
| signbsl.com: https://github.com/sandbach/bsl-gcse
|
| And an Arabic one by scraping Reverso:
| https://github.com/sandbach/arabic_vocabulary
| whartung wrote:
| I have lots of project's smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.
|
| One of them is a years long passion that consists of several,
| large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I'll
| call about the 75% mark.
|
| I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound
| out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.
|
| My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on
| it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the
| span of 2 weeks.
|
| It's hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar
| code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a
| buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator
| as a baseline.
|
| "Computers are deterministic!" Hah! Not this one!
|
| But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.
| throwaway638637 wrote:
| How do people with kids do this kind of stuff lol?
| kfarr wrote:
| Late nights and not enough sleep
| djmips wrote:
| They're 10X parents.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| they don't
| zeroq wrote:
| "The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many
| developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-
| skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a
| task from start to finish without any change in the user
| requirements."
| blatantly wrote:
| A side project is creative while work is reductive (not
| necessarily a bad thing!)
|
| Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3
| coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by
| Friday.
|
| I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these
| would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of
| systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to
| familiarity.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Great metaphor but I feel like my day job is graffiti style
| crap code that just barely passes QA while all of my side
| project code is the good good 3 coats of SW superpaint
| californical wrote:
| Graffiti can be as beautiful or messy as you want! You can
| put any amount of effort in to the craft
| fredro wrote:
| I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project
| way.
|
| Blissful Zen is a great way to put it.
|
| Story: My mother had 2 of her 3 dogs die on the same day. We
| buried them in the backyard as we have many little friends before
| them. This was the first time I dug the graves (my dad had always
| beared that -- but he passed away last year).
|
| The grave soil was very clay rich. I had recently seen a video on
| how to reclaim natural clay. It was very rewarding to turn the
| natural clay into workable clay.
|
| But the real challenge -- how to fire it? I saw guys using
| charcoal and bricks in their driveway but that can't get hot
| enough.
|
| So the real Zen has been building an electric kiln from scratch.
| It is a simple-ish problem with a whole lot of simplish steps.
| Perfect to keep my mind occupied when it needs to be. I have also
| learned an amazing amount (about clay, pottery, kilns,
| Arduino/ESP32, thermocouples, resistance wire, refractory cement,
| insulation, electrical code, weird soldering techniques, and many
| more).
|
| First fire will be tomorrow.
| davidanekstein wrote:
| This sounds amazingly cool, would love to read about the
| process after you're done if you have an intention to write
| about it.
| ehaveman wrote:
| this resonates.
|
| "consumption-to-creation ratio" are words i've never put to that
| positive feeling of choosing to code over watching another TV
| show or the negative feeling of the alternative choice.
|
| recently i feel like vibe coding is a cheat code in this respect
| - i can code while watching TV... and a few times the output of
| the vibe coding exercise was interesting enough to switch to full
| attention coding.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| My side projects have always mirrored work to a certain extent,
| kind of building what I wish I could really do at work.
|
| Led to my current job, which I love. Hopefully this lasts.
| keyle wrote:
| It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I
| can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without
| feeling like I'm wasting time.
|
| This has lead to many, many side projects throughout the years,
| which I tend to like a zen garden[1]. Pruning, refining,
| improving, and sometimes rewriting.
|
| As soon as I work out the game mechanics of any game, I just see
| it as just content now, and there is nothing holding me back to
| play any longer. Same with watching TV shows or movies, I lose
| interest pretty quickly and feel an urge to create something.
|
| I've always been very in tune with time, our lack of it, and felt
| like consumption is a waste of time.
|
| That said I believe creativity is hormonal (that is only my
| personal belief, unproven). It comes and goes. Some days I can't
| stop creating, somedays I want netflix and chill. But that's 10
| days cycle of sorts, 10 days on, 10 days off.
|
| Depending on where you live, it's perfectly normal that due to
| current events, or a personal loss in your life, etc. you might
| not feel the creative bug tickling you. The creative hormone
| might be totally wiped by your current environment or
| predicament; tiredness, anger, stress, all play into it.
|
| After all, since our early days in the caves, drawing on walls,
| Humans wouldn't do so unless they had safety, a full belly, and a
| warm fire. A place to call home. Creative time needs conditions
| to be filled.
|
| [1] https://noben.org
| aaarrm wrote:
| I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know
| thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to
| anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or
| what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself
| out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment.
|
| Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious
| about what I should be doing with my time instead.
| mahoumaigo wrote:
| I'm also like this. Some part of me feels that any moment
| spent not honing a skill / advancing in some way is a wasted
| one. I know it's a bs perspective, but still I find myself
| taking it constantly. I do manage to force myself out of this
| way of thinking from time to time, but it requires conscious
| effort to do so.
|
| I imagine this forum has its fair share of people who fall
| for this "overachiever fallacy". I'd be curious to hear how
| others deal with it.
| jcpst wrote:
| For the longest time I railed against the fact that I am
| mortal, and my time is finite. I wanted to squeeze
| everything I could into my days, and I would feel guilty
| about projects I didn't get to. This is despite having a
| wife, kids, house, full time job.
|
| Eventually I burned out on programming-based side projects.
| I switched to activities that do not require staring at a
| screen. So I build analog electronics, study music.
|
| Then I had a heart attack. My mortality and the fragility
| of life was never more clear. I accepted that I could die,
| and let go of all the mental baggage I was holding onto.
|
| I've felt 'cured' ever since. I don't recommend anyone get
| a heart attack. But I do think people fall into patterns,
| and get stuck inside of them. Sometimes a "pattern
| interrupter" can break us out.
| josephburnett wrote:
| In terms of side projects, I've deliberately curated a
| smaller set that meets multiple criteria. Social
| connection, simplicity and elegance, and the ability to
| start and stop at will.
|
| At work I am always looking for ways to do more than one
| thing at once. Learn a new skill. Teach something. Solve a
| small problem. Make myself feel good. Take the solution to
| the next level.
|
| I think it's okay to want to always be honing and
| advancing. Humans are always seeking lower energy paths.
| Maybe you just need to expand the scope of the skills
| you're seeking. One of the most valuable skills in my work
| is the ability to stop and think about what I'm actually
| trying to do. That is honed through stopping and observing
| (meditation).
| sgarland wrote:
| I had that mindset, but then an overwhelming amount of
| personal and work stress made me change. Unfortunately, as
| I wrote in a comment further up, now I feel like I'm too
| far on the other side, where all I do after work is relax.
|
| If anyone has suggestions on striking a balance, I'd love
| to hear them.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I share the experience of all 4 parents of this comment.
| It turned out I had undiagnosed ADHD. After diagnosis all
| my life suddenly made sense. Before the diagnosis, my
| situation had progressed to a point I'd get burnout by
| just everyday life, let alone work. Everything was
| _overwhelming_. Treatment turned my life around.
|
| Later, I found out I have autism too - many autistic
| people "mask" around other people, altering their
| behavior to hide autistic traits. This is another thing
| causing (temporary) burnout after being around people.
| sgarland wrote:
| LOL yes. I have diagnosed and treated ADHD, and my
| therapist suspects (but it is currently undiagnosed) that
| I am autistic. Super fun times.
| prox wrote:
| If you are very analytical, a good call is to learn a
| different way of being, call it "acceptance mode"
|
| If you look at techniques employed from modern buddhism /
| zen, where you just learn to settle into present (breath,
| sensory experiences etc.) you can learn to shift your mind
| from analysis to acceptance modes.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Whenever I feel like I'm losing time, I go watch this and I
| feel much better
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZbfNtDCHdM
| @sappho3000 11 months ago stop glamorizing
| "the grind" and start glamorizing whatever this is
| b2w wrote:
| That's a very funny video! I'm curious to see if I can get
| my swim club to do something like this :-)
| joseferben wrote:
| for me i figured out it's about the body. it's ok to be
| lifted up from the body into the thinking mind but i "owe" my
| body to spend some time there as well.
|
| sometimes all it takes is sitting 20min in the morning just
| observing sensations in my body, and saying good morning to
| various organs haha. sounds silly but creates a solid
| foundation for my day.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| I'm in the same boat.
|
| I'll say LLMs have influenced this for me. I've lost some
| part of what made programming "interesting".
|
| Sure, digging through docs and finding small-scale workable
| examples to for boillerplate/whatever was never fun, but a
| lot of what drew me to programming was the wading into the
| unknown and the satisfaction of figuring things out (often
| even "chore" type things).
|
| I'll keep looking for a new hobby, I guess.
|
| Related, I feel like programming jobs are on the way out, one
| way or another (at least for me); programming recreationally
| had the side benefit of increasing marketable skill--this was
| never a primary or even secondary motivator for me, but now
| seeing as it's benefit in that realm seems far smaller, I've
| also lost motivation there.
|
| Maybe I'll feel a bit better as the weather improves.
| wonger_ wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed that when I have lots of stressors, I don't
| have any creative energy. I have to give myself permission to
| let go, that it's ok to forget about a side project. It's more
| important to focus on self-care and tackling irl problems at
| that point.
|
| But when life is good, it's hard to stop tinkering. Weekend-
| sized projects are the best. For me, it's an urge to create and
| see the core 20% come to life, not to maintain the boring parts
| over time.
|
| Hormonal fluctuations is an interesting theory. I always
| thought it's just a need for variety -- sometimes consuming
| (i.e. developing taste, curating, exploring), sometimes
| creating, sometimes relaxing. For me the cycle is months at a
| time.
| prox wrote:
| One of the hallmarks of people who get stressed, and
| especially people with burnout is that they don't have any
| creative or any relaxive or active outlet anymore. They get
| kind of stuck in their stressloop.
|
| Say a people who enjoyed playing an instrument stops playing,
| etc.
|
| The best companies I worked allowed for a bit of game/social
| activity between work sessions.
| sgarland wrote:
| My current problem is that I feel like I'm only barely
| managing to not completely burn out via relaxation at
| night. I used to have a ton of excitement over my side
| project, but for the past several months, I can't muster
| the energy. I play a board game on Steam (Wingspan: 10/10
| would recommend the physical and digital version) that has
| a soundtrack I like, and that's about it. This keeps me
| sane, but I often find myself wishing I felt confident
| enough to extend myself further.
|
| Hopefully when my current large work project wraps up I'll
| be able to take a breather.
| m463 wrote:
| wingspan is on my wishlist.
|
| I played this computer game "eliza" by zachtronics and it
| had this very interesting solitaire mini-game inside it.
| I liked it so much I bought the zachtronics solitaire
| collection. And wow, I would launch it "between things"
| for a moment and it could easily spin the clock forward
| an hour or more.
|
| I had to _delete_ it from my computer.
|
| I think there are some things you have to just say no to
| and go through the pain of making yourself bored so
| something better will fill in.
|
| I think wingspan may remain on my wishlist :)
| Globz wrote:
| I've noticed this trend in my life where during winter times
| my consumption goes way up and as soon as spring time is here
| then my creativity crawls back from hibernation and I quickly
| regain motivation to continue my side projects. I wish I
| could be 100% focus year round but for some reason it very
| hard to keep the inner flame of creativity going during
| winter times. At least I did noticed this pattern and being
| aware is the first step to remedy this problem.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| In some ways we are just like plants. Direct exposure to
| fresh air and sunlight will greatly contribute to a burst
| of energy and focus.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Oh wow! I've noticed a definitely cycle to my creativity as
| well definitely correlated with stress. I've never thought
| about hormonal changes. I've recently started taking lots
| vitamins and keeping track of my motivation via a spreadsheet
| each day. No conclusions yet, but I'm curious to see what
| will show up
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I find that due to having a remote job and living alone (albeit
| with my lovely dog) I'm less inclined to work on a side project
| where I'm again alone. I tend to gravitate more nowadays to
| spending time with people and being outdoors.
|
| I used to be really active on side projects when I was a
| teacher. I'd have my social interaction filled to the brim so
| side projects were a way to have some alone time and recharge.
| dilawar wrote:
| > somedays I want netflix and chill.
|
| I call them a zero day.
| theF00l wrote:
| I wonder if it's always a zero day. I think that things and
| ways of thinking create momentum. The more you netflix and
| chill, the likelier you are to netflix and chill.
| jacamera wrote:
| Yeah I definitely struggle with this. You need downtime to
| relax but it's easy to "over relax" just like it's easy to
| oversleep or overeat or overdo any other number of things
| that are healthy and necessary but only at the right
| amplitude and frequency. I think that's why it can feel so
| good to be in a rhythm. You get a nice oscillation going
| that rides the wave of momentum instead of some monotonic
| rise or fall that is going to lead to burnout or
| stagnation.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Ever since I started working
| professionally, I was always praised for delivering first, and
| it shows in how I work. I'm a maker, I love to deliver. I have
| a few side projects as well, a few that are relatively
| completed and I haven't even deployed them, because they were
| just fun to build. Some are deployed, and I enjoy polishing
| them.
|
| On the other hand, I remember that time you enjoy wasting is
| not a wasted time. I don't sleep well if I don't just chill and
| forget about the world, from time to time. It's like in the
| Sims. I aim towards my creativity and entertainment need bars
| to be filled. While coding, I often increase the fill of both
| bars.
| djmips wrote:
| How are your in the opposite camp of an article encouraging
| side projects when you say you have many side projects?
| keyle wrote:
| The author wrote about long periods of time when he wasn't
| encouraged to make anything creative, and just consume.
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| You're definitely not alone.
|
| In my case it's somewhat of a learned behavior, a lot of my
| favorite video games make me violently motion sick so over
| time I just stopped playing them.
|
| Most TV is pretty boring IMO. There's always exceptions but
| it's not something I find myself regularly being drawn to.
|
| I'm always tinkering on something (a longtime favorite is
| gardening), and I'm pretty sure I'll always be tinkering
| until the day I die. Some of us are just wired differently.
|
| Can be a little difficult to connect with the mainstream
| folks though. I pretty much live in a different world.
| fragmede wrote:
| Thankfully the long tail of the Internet means there _is_
| a world you can connect to.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| Have you tried League of Legends or Valorant? I'm like you as I
| can't not have multiple side projects going on at any time, but
| at the same time there is so much room to improve in these
| kinds of game I find them hard to stop at times.
| diggan wrote:
| I'm somewhat the same way as parent, getting bored once I
| figured out the mechanics. While I haven't tried League of
| Legends, I have tried Valorant, and generally the type of
| games that is more about _mastery_ of a skill rather than
| discovery, exploration, story or problem-solving, gets boring
| fast for me at least.
| chenshuiluke wrote:
| I wish I could be more like you in this regard. Perhaps you're
| right about the "creative hormone" thing.
| intelVISA wrote:
| We have finite time, self-actualization through creation is
| very human. Too much passive consumption is sleepwalking
| through life.
|
| However, creators often forget that mental exercise is like
| physical, you don't sprint 24/7 you have to pace intensity
| whether it's running or writing Clojure.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| This is how I am except with nostalgia content, which I cannot
| see as just content.
|
| It is however impossible for me to play the latest games or
| watch the latest shows for 10 minutes without feeling like my
| time is being wasted.
| tombert wrote:
| I had a lot of fun overengineering the hell out of the status bar
| in Sway recently. It was something that I got working in fifteen
| minutes in Bash, and then ended up rewriting in Clojure, then
| figuring out how to get working with GraalVM, and then just kept
| adding features and making it more customizable.
|
| None of this was that _hard_ (outside of making it async-
| friendly, that was a little tricky), but it also wasn 't trivial.
| I had Law and Order on in the background, and I hacked on it for
| a few days, and it did kind of get me into a "zen state".
| Figuring out how to make the code more flexible and figuring out
| which features I can feasibly add was relaxing.
|
| I think part of it was that there's really no consequences to
| this. If I screw something up, no one is going to be mad at me,
| no one is going to yell at me, I'm not going to get fired, and
| I'm allowed to go off onto any tangents that I would like because
| I'm just doing this for fun. It doesn't feel like "work" because
| "work" often involves me working on stuff I don't want to work
| on. If something is too frustrating, I don't have to go through
| approvals and legal to import a library that does it for me. I
| can spend as much or as little time as I'd like writing
| documentation. I can micro-optimize or not-optimize however I'd
| like.
|
| And fundamentally, if I screw something up, it's the text on the
| Swaybar, it's really not the end of the world.
|
| It can be tough to find a project that holds my interest enough
| to get into this. I tend to have the most fun working on stuff
| that is completely unimportant, because if I'm not trying to
| change the world, then I can be as creative as I like.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Creation-to-Consumption ratio, really well put. I never thought
| of this before, but will now keep this in my mental models
| FatChauncy wrote:
| I've had a similar feeling lately after deciding to dust off some
| old textbooks and brush up on my math.
| damion6 wrote:
| It'd be nice if folks stopped using a religion as a catch phrase.
| If I included Jesus in a catchy title people would be offended
| djmips wrote:
| Gatekeeping the use of the word Zen in English is probably
| counter to the core principles ironically. But I understand
| your concern.
|
| Even the CPU in my computer is named Zen
| bitbuilder wrote:
| This article really resonated with me.
|
| I'm currenlty juggling a few side projects, one of which is a
| game I've been tinkering with for 3 years. It's a pretty simple
| simulation of riding your bike through a city at night. It's
| never been anywhere near close to anything I could actually
| release, but I finally at least pulled together a gameplay video
| I could show off to my familiy and friends. They were all pretty
| impressed, and all wanted to know when I'd actually release it.
|
| But I doubt I ever will. To me, making the game _is_ my game, and
| I 've tried to frame my side project work to my gamer friends
| that way. Sometimes it's giving myself new techncial puzzles to
| figure out, other times it's just letting myself zone out and get
| creative with world building, snapping together building facades
| like legos to build whatever crazy city I can imagine. It's so
| much fun.
|
| Another is a web project that's much less fun and creative, but
| the more I tinker with it the more it turns into something that
| may actually be useful to others. And it may actually turn into
| something I can release and promote, and maybe even earn a little
| beer money with. I'm currently working up the motivation and
| courage to do a Show HN on that one here soon.
|
| It almost pains me to say it (for reasons I can't even articulate
| well) but I've found LLMs to be tremendously useful in pushing
| through on side project work. I've lost track of how many
| projects I've spun up over the years and abandoned as soon as I
| got to the tedious parts you need to tackle if you actually want
| a marketable product (admin interfaces, user accounts, endless
| boilerplate html, etc, etc). With a competent LLM I can just
| delegate all the tedious crap and stay focused on what's actually
| fun for me. It's great.
| djmips wrote:
| I really like the concept of night driving in the city.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I've finally gotten to a place in my life financially where I
| don't care as much about the potential of making money from side
| projects and get to just build what I find interesting with the
| care and attention that I've always wanted.
|
| It's very zen, finally I feel no pressure to make progress, or
| feel like I'm wasting time by refactoring.
|
| Sometimes I'd spend days just trying to get an animation exactly
| how I wanted to, or build vanity features entirely because
| they're cool.
|
| Everything else I've worked on, had aspirations of making money
| one day, and it quickly becomes a job.
|
| (Working on https://canine.sh)
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| Zen is found, Not in a project. But in desire,
| To quell a need. A need born, From purity of
| thought. Thought without, Encumbrance.
| Thought without, Politics. Thought without,
| Concern of outcome. But in desire, To quell a
| need. To find Zen, Not from a project.
| But within oneself.
| shashanoid wrote:
| There's nothing more euphoric to me than working on a good
| project which I thought of as an idea and watching it turn real.
| I can work on it all day and not feel tired.. in the zone,
| meditating.. building.
| bdean0001 wrote:
| Really enjoying this thread, especially the points about creative
| cycles and the connection between stress and our drive to create.
| I recently wrote a book that dives into some of this, blending
| behavioral psychology with mindset principles like the law of
| attraction. It's all about how our habits, thoughts, and
| environment shape our ability to stay inspired and follow through
| on projects.
|
| If anyone's curious, I'm happy to send over a free copy--just
| reply. Always love connecting with others who think deeply about
| creativity and motivation.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DWM35DXH
| nradov wrote:
| It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good".
|
| My last significant side project was the opposite of "blissful".
| In order to preserve and migrate some important personal data I
| had to reverse engineer an obsolete, undocumented file format.
| Then I had to use a confusing and badly documented commercial
| library to convert the data into a modern file format. I had to
| figure everything out through trial and error with nearly zero
| support. It was a frustrating pain in the ass from start to
| finish and while I'm satisfied with the results I didn't enjoy a
| minute of it.
| barbs wrote:
| Is it weird that I actually think that sounds enjoyable?
| tasuki wrote:
| Wrt creating, writing a blog post also counts!
| jlcases wrote:
| Documentation quality has been the determining factor in the
| evolution of my side projects. I've developed a structured
| documentation system that has completely transformed my workflow
| with AI assistants.
| leoedin wrote:
| Can you share more about this?
|
| I think that's often the thing that kills my side projects.
| I'll make reasonable progress, lose interest for a bit, and
| then when I come back to it all the working memory is gone and
| so I spend a few hours just getting up to speed again. Better
| ongoing documentation to allow quicker self-onboarding is what
| I need!
| Philpax wrote:
| I've had reasonable success with taking diary-style notes on
| whatever project I'm working on within that project's page in
| Obsidian, and then when I need to come back to it, either
| reading over it or passing it through a LLM to summarise /
| ask me targeted questions to prod my memory.
| paulbjensen wrote:
| This post hit the nail on the head for me.
|
| Having just finished up a 4-year contracting gig this week, I
| decided to learn Svelte and recreate a silly little music PoC I
| made about 15 years ago:
|
| Demo: http://lets-make-sweet-music.com Github:
| http://github.com/paulbjensen/lets-make-sweet-music
|
| I started making it about 2 days ago - One of my former
| colleagues even managed to play the Jurassic Park theme song on
| it for a bit.
|
| What I loved about working on that side project I think is a
| couple of things:
|
| 1 - I could have an idea, implement it, and push it up right
| away.
|
| This is a breathe of fresh air compared to the coding process at
| my last gig. The client had a well-structured process of
| submitting pull requests which required a code review approval
| before being merged into the codebase.
|
| That process meant that you essentially spent your day picking up
| tickets and moving them along, and because people wouldn't
| necessarily be immediately available to perform the code review,
| the PR could stay open for quite some time.
|
| That delayed feedback loop and hoop-jumping process adds stop-
| starts into the coding flow state. You can never get into it the
| same way you can working on a side project.
|
| 2 - The tech stack choices are yours to make and quick to do
|
| The tech stack choices used with the client were made by the tech
| steering committee and your job was essentially to implement the
| features required by your product team within the parameters of
| those tech stack choices. They do that to ensure that there is a
| consistent use of technologies within the company, to the extent
| that you can quickly swap say frontend engineers from one team to
| another whenever needed and they can be productive.
|
| On one hand that is great, but on the other hand you don't have
| the freedom to try new technologies, or even introduce tooling
| that you feel is better suited for the requirement.
|
| I even had to justify trying to use Sentry rather than
| ElasticSearch's Kibana for error logging, even though the client
| was using both tools within the business.
|
| When you are working on the side project, you can make choices
| and decisions far quicker and easier - the feedback loop is just
| much quicker and progress happens faster.
|
| 3 - The scope of your input into the side project is far greater
|
| When I worked with the client, I was effectively working as a
| frontend engineer, because they had a gap in a product team to
| fill.
|
| However, my skills and experience in my career extended to being
| a full-stack developer who also liked to work on design work in
| Sketch and even knew how to deploy to VPS, not just work with a
| PaaS.
|
| When you don't get to use those skills daily in your client work,
| they will wither, and you can end up becoming pigeon-holed and
| institutionalised into a narrow way-of-working, which is a danger
| to being able to apply the full extent of your capabilities.
|
| So the side projects end up serving as a way to exercise those
| underused skills. Especially if you relish having creative
| freedom, which reminds me of something that Paul Graham said
| about developers - they don't do it necessarily for the money -
| they do it to have creative freedom.
|
| I haven't found the link to the video, but he touches on it a bit
| in this post: https://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
| monkeydust wrote:
| Most of my creation is done at work now, previously more balanced
| outside of work with side projects but with little kids a more
| demanding job its hard, so outside work time is more consumption,
| though some of that is social consumption which I feel has value
| (pub, gaming).
| brador wrote:
| I've noticed I get this same feeling by writing a tight prompt to
| AI. Not even reading the result fully, just sending it to be deep
| processed.
|
| Good for a quick hit of bliss zen when you need it.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I've spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning
| through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with
| that approach.
|
| I burned out on gaming a few years ago. I used to be able to
| power through weeks of the most inane incremental "game" slop as
| if it was a voyage to the new world. Now I struggle to force
| myself to play the most acclaimed AAA titles for 15-20 minutes. I
| still browse the steam store from time to time, but I finally
| stopped buying things.
|
| The amount of time I spend on side projects has almost perfectly
| filled the gap. There have even been a few nights recently where
| I stayed up very late to watch an experiment unfold. We're
| talking about staring at a single chart that updates once a
| second for hours that is getting my heart rate up like a League
| of Legends game.
|
| I think from a dopamine perspective, you can make a good trade
| here. The other side can feel even better. It's the transition
| period that hurts. You've got to get that first tiny bit of
| traction on the project so it feels like you might eventually
| have an impact in the world around you. The more it sucks during
| the first 48 hours, the more likely it will stick indefinitely.
| When you come back in the morning to a successful experiment run
| or a good stopping point, it can _very_ quickly snowball into
| something that rivals the pharmacology of gaming.
| andai wrote:
| Ah yes, "blissful" Zen. That's the best kind!
|
| ---
|
| It reminds me of Yunmen, a monk who lived in China. He was born
| around 860 A.D. and he lived ninety years. His enlightenment
| story is a classic:
|
| One day, Yunmen went to visit Mujo. When Mujo heard Yunmen
| coming, he closed the door to his room. Yunmen knocked on the
| door. Mujo said, "Who is it?"
|
| Yunmen said, "It's me."
|
| Mujo said, "What do you want?"
|
| Yunmen said, "I'm not clear about my life. I'd like the master to
| give me some instruction."
|
| Mujo then opened the door, took one look at Yunmen and closed it
| again.
|
| Yunmen knocked on the door like this for three days in a row. On
| the third day, when Mujo opened the door, Yunmen stuck his foot
| in the door. Mujo grabbed Yunmen and yelled, "Speak! Speak!" When
| Yunmen began to speak, Mujo gave him a shove and said, "Too
| late." Mujo slammed the door. Yunmen's foot was still there, and
| the slamming door broke Yunmen's foot. And at that moment, Yunmen
| was greatly enlightened.
|
| https://emptysqua.re/blog/the-day-yunmen-broke-his-foot/
| b0dhimind wrote:
| What's the meaning of this? Be spontaneous and give up on
| contriving so much
| drellybochelly wrote:
| > I've spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning
| through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with
| that approach.
|
| I feel like I can only play games that are about 20-50 hours and
| have a definitive end or game that you can chip away at an hour
| at a time (e.g. EAFC). Even playing for just a couple hours a
| night feels like time that could be going towards a side project
| but time to unwind is important.
| jazzcomputer wrote:
| I'm in my 50s and I'm currently mulling the conundrum of being an
| artist and designer with art and design side projects, and now
| having them sidelined by a new-found interest in p5js. I'm
| getting little glimpses of observing myself and how I'm
| responding to my side-project time being increasingly compacted
| by parenting, work and also a recent flush of training for a
| mountain run (in order to maintain some fitness) - I also had a
| temporary obsession with learning wheelies on my bike, which
| further compacted time available for javascript learning outside
| of work hours.
|
| Anyways - this article was a good read, and I've enjoyed the
| observations in the comments - especially about the body and the
| ebb and flow nature of time spent on side projects.
|
| I had a kind of burn-out last year where I'd work 'til 1am and
| then feel drained and grouchy the next day. A new found interest
| in sleep has been paying dividends, but I need to lean into it
| further.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| The interesting thing with my side projects is that they are ever
| so close to being a full-on business, but they are slightly under
| the threshold where I could go all in (stay at home wife, three
| kids, American healthcare costs). So, it's hard to think of them
| as "side" projects when in reality they've become a "side"
| business. It's like I have no choice but to take them a bit
| seriously, though I do hope to find the time for a "love of the
| game" side project. Great post.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I'm a bit behind where you are with my side businesses, and the
| way I feel about them is more acutely aware of the time
| tradeoff I have to make to work on them.
|
| To side hustle on my job board, I have to give up hanging out
| with my kid.
|
| That's just not a trade I've felt like making recently.
|
| On top of that, I just changed jobs, and got a _very_
| appreciable salary bump for it. It makes the grind of the side
| business seem pretty paltry in comparison: the returns on my
| main career track are just so much bigger thanks to my
| compounding experience and skill there.
| grahar64 wrote:
| I like to have side projects that end in a blog post. So many
| people never share side projects because they are going for
| perfection and give up on the way, but if the end result is not
| code or a product I find it more enjoyable to work on. Like have
| a vision of what you want to explore and focus on that.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Echoes of Howard Roark.
| irishloop wrote:
| > I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask
| me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that's it. We exist
| to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting
| something new into our world--and in doing so, fundamentally
| changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.
|
| I find this a rather strange, limited way of looking at our
| existence.
|
| I believe there is joy in creating. I believe there is joy in
| just spending time with the people you love. I believe there is
| joy in exploring new places, people, ideas. I believe there is
| joy in being still and present.
|
| We are always looking for some singular, defining thing in our
| lives. What does it all _mean_. It has to be _for_ something.
|
| But I disagree. It doesn't have to be for anything. It's enough
| to just do what brings you joy, to evolve and change, to treat
| others in kindness. The rest is just personal preferences.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I feel like there are two kinds of side projects. One type is a
| small project that can be coded up in a short time (a weekend or
| a few evenings). It reaches a functional stage rather quickly and
| only takes a few hours to fix bugs or improve the user
| experience.
|
| The other type is much bigger and can take months or even years.
| New features are added from time to time, but must also fit into
| a well defined architecture.
|
| Both types can be satisfying but require different approaches.
| The first gives you a bunch of different projects that get
| shuffled around and easily abandoned. The second requires more
| discipline as you continually build upon previous layers.
|
| Since they are both side projects, you can go weeks without
| looking at them or spend all your spare time on them for extended
| periods.
|
| I have a side project that I have dabbled with for a decade.
| There are months where I get many features working and others
| where I barely look at it. It just depends on what else is
| happening in my life at the moment.
| MattSayar wrote:
| I love this, and yes can completely relate. The last side project
| I got absorbed into[0] completely consumed me for a weekend. I
| was driven like a man possessed to finish it before Monday. I had
| to leave the house and stake out a corner in a coffee shop to
| concentrate. The scope of the project was perfect: it was small
| enough to do in a weekend, I was building something I needed, and
| something that could help others. _Creating something_ is so much
| fun, especially when you have a long-lasting way to share it like
| your own website.
|
| I know people disparage LLMs for not building any serious code.
| Yes it's only a hobby project and not a production system, but my
| little project really would never have left the ground without
| it.
|
| [0] https://mattsayar.com/i-didnt-want-to-pay-for-a-
| newsletter-e...
| gdubs wrote:
| I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have
| in my career came because my side projects were interesting and
| sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's
| so much specialization in our era - being able to connect dots
| across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a
| superpower.
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