[HN Gopher] Protect your shed
___________________________________________________________________
Protect your shed
Author : baely
Score : 296 points
Date : 2026-04-08 03:03 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dylanbutler.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (dylanbutler.dev)
| netule wrote:
| This post really resonated with me. Through the daily drudgery, I
| lost that spark that drove me to programming in the first place
| as a kid and became disgruntled with it for a while. It wasn't
| until I pushed myself to get back to hobby (or shed) programming
| that I rekindled my old passion and, as a result, find my day job
| much more bearable.
| Nursie wrote:
| Opposite for me.
|
| I have an actual shed that I spend time in, doing maintenance
| work, building physical items (latest one is an auto-refilling
| bird watering station), and making beer. Given my day job is so
| desk-bound, and so tech oriented, I find using my hands in my
| off-time to be very fulfilling and what keeps me sane.
|
| Different strokes, as they say.
| chrneu wrote:
| I had to get out of tech for that reason: i need a physical
| good I can create and hold. Using my engineer skills to build
| physical things satiates my brain so much more. I don't think
| I can ever go back to coding as a job. I just don't care
| about other people's garbage code, lol.
|
| i got out of tech/coding so i could apply my skills to more
| real world stuff. it's been so much better. i don't make as
| much but i end each day with a feeling of satisfaction and
| accomplishment. i wouldn't trade it away. my social life has
| gotten so much better, as well, because i'm happier in
| general and i talk to so many more people as a result. i
| smile more, i think is the main thing.
| kuerbel wrote:
| And what are you doing now? :-)
| jondwillis wrote:
| How'd you get out? For the many over-specialized readers
| like myself...
| cheschire wrote:
| Surely step one is psychological. I feel like being able
| to accept a lower paycheck is critical to leaving tech if
| you're at the over specialized part of your career
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That is not merely psychological unless you're very early
| in your career and _life_ , with no dependents, etc.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Technically, leaving your family to live as a hermit is
| also a psychological decision.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| That's financial and circumstantial, not (just)
| psychological.
| recursive wrote:
| Psychological in the sense that my kids will need to
| psychologically accept that they now live under a bridge?
| khoitsma wrote:
| Congratulations and thanks for sharing.
| ssiddharth wrote:
| Same here. I've been trying to get more into the physical
| world, with a tech angle, rather than just pure software. As
| you said, using my hands is what keeps me sane, makes the
| world seem a little more real, if that makes sense?
| franciscop wrote:
| I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot
| of fun and the side projects gave me energy.
|
| Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and
| a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be
| tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's
| just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.
|
| I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating
| deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I
| have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS
| libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of
| it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've
| actually done.
| dgb23 wrote:
| There's this special feeling when you can sit down later in the
| evening to tinker for a couple of hours, or read a
| challenging/inspiring book in peace.
|
| But when I don't have time and frankly energy, then I still try
| to do _some_ minutes of this kind of thing daily.
|
| I feel like there's a big difference between 0min and 15min for
| anything (also includes exercise, meditation etc.), and while
| it's great to have more time, there are diminishing returns
| beyond 30/45min.
| franciscop wrote:
| When I push myself to do these things, it loses all meaning.
| I do fun programming because it's fun, when I tried pushing
| myself like this virtually always I ended up more tired (for
| a miryad of reasons). And if I need to push myself, I'd
| rather just learn more Japanese, or do some exercise, or
| something else. But when I have like 1-2 weeks holiday, I
| will for sure sneak a few full coding days in there, and that
| is liberating.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I agree with this. But there's a big difference between
| building a habit of doing some intellectual or creative
| activity regularly and pushing yourself to do a specific
| thing.
|
| Before having built a more regular habit I was often in a
| sort of excitement-burnout loop. That doesn't work well for
| me.
| smm11 wrote:
| Yep, beyond 30 minutes or so I'll just switch rooms and watch
| a hockey or baseball game. I'm at the "done that" phase now.
| Not much excites me in the computer space.
| vachanmn123 wrote:
| Everytime I go back and look at some of my older projects, I am
| in awe of how much I had done in the short while when I was
| working on it. Side Projects are kind of the only real way I
| think one can learn software engineering. Great read
| skyberrys wrote:
| It is about finding balance between building in your shed and
| building skyscrapers.
| d--b wrote:
| Personally, I am over side projects.
|
| Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.
|
| I just do other things now.
|
| Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer
| outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).
|
| It's fine. My career's fine. The work doesn't suffer from it.
|
| Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark
| shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it's tedious, I'll drag me
| feet a while, but eventually it'll be done. It's just work.
| imiric wrote:
| I think both viewpoints are valid. It's perfectly fine to see
| your work as a craft which you hone in your personal time, and
| also see it as a means to an end where you clock in, get the
| job done, and clock out. It's also understandable that the
| amount of personal time we have to dedicate to it, and even
| interest, can vary over time.
|
| That said, I think your day job is more enjoyable when you see
| your work as a craft. It becomes less of a chore, you feel more
| engaged, and generally happier, which ultimately has a positive
| impact on your work and your colleagues. This has been my very
| fuzzy experience over the years, going through periods of both,
| but there are no definitive perspectives either way.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| About the work being more enjoyable when seeing it as a
| craft: I think it only is more enjoyable, if you can somehow
| bring part of your craftsmanship into it, and are not overly
| limited by other people or the sprint or management or any of
| the other many factors that ruin the fun, like time
| available, terrible inherited codebase that would take weeks
| or months to fix, and so on.
| imiric wrote:
| Well, sure, there are aspects of the work that can suck the
| joy out of it, but that's part of it. :) Even in personal
| projects I can create a codebase that's difficult to work
| with, or depend on third party code and tools that I don't
| particularly enjoy. The tricky task is navigating in and
| around these hurdles, knowing how and when to address them,
| and ultimately, simply accepting them. If your expectation
| is constant enjoyment, you'll be disappointed not just at
| work, but at life in general.
|
| That said, I struggle with this as well, so I'm speaking
| more aspirationally than from a place of wisdom. :)
| adrianwaj wrote:
| Is there a place where people can document and share the things
| they are tinkering with in the shed?
|
| I had this idea where people's inventions/devices could be sent
| around in a "pay-it-forward circle" for learning and inspiration.
| People already do that with crystals.
|
| Also, can being aware that x number of people are working on the
| same thing yield to development in the state-of-the-art if they
| start working together?
|
| I suppose there's always that tension between DIY'ers bouncing
| ideas off each other vs prototypes built in fitted-out research
| labs to think about.
|
| Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-
| reddit or using existing teamwork software?
|
| If you had something to share, how would you choose it amongst
| the 10's or 100's of things you have already built? Maybe you'd
| need commercialization help? Are there liabilities and risks in
| sharing DIY devices?
|
| I've been thinking about https://openhardware.directory/ and
| https://ohwr.org/ - maybe if you list your projects, agents can
| do the work of bringing people together and finding new ways to
| develop them. It's about value-adding on top of decentralized and
| disjointed projects. An easy way to construct plans or follow
| them? How to minimize duplicated work across the world?
|
| Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (http://ucp.dev) but for
| scientists?
| yetihehe wrote:
| Hackaday.com comes to mind. That's a blog with those tinkering
| things. Hackaday.io is a big base where people store their
| schematics and worklog, present their inventions and tinkering
| as they happen.
| buildbot wrote:
| Hackaday is amazing - so many cool, inspiring ideas. It's
| been around a very long time too.
| adrianwaj wrote:
| It's also owned by Siemens via Supplyframe. That means its
| content is controlled to a certain degree. Sort of like the
| way Vice is controlled by its owners. In that way it could
| function as controlled opposition. Be careful what you
| submit too.
|
| I wonder if it'd be possible to create a Hackaday-type site
| with HN content. hackernewsbooks.com >> hackernewshacks.com
| gbgarbeb wrote:
| Ever heard of Github? Or forums?
| mikestaas wrote:
| Hobby related forums are a great way for people working on
| similar projects to collaborate and share SoTA. Some random
| examples:
|
| https://www.lathetrolls.com/
|
| https://www.shroomery.org/
| adrianwaj wrote:
| Good links. "Guests visiting the site are around 250, instead
| of the 48976 (mostly bots) we had two days ago. Let's see how
| it goes over the course of today."
|
| https://www.lathetrolls.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=10610
|
| How funny would it be if one of the AI firms started offering
| free web hosting, just to get good UGC back? They could even
| block bots from competitors, right?
| ad8e wrote:
| The second half of this article is detected as AI by pangram:
| https://www.pangram.com/history/63fdecd4-f932-4fad-af60-da99...
| eterm wrote:
| Ai detectors are bullshit.
|
| That said, the second paragraph has the distinctive stocatto
| tone of AI
|
| But AI is shaping how we write, so this could well all be hand
| written just by someone who spends time with AI output.
| pityJuke wrote:
| AI is also based on how we write. Some people are bound to
| write in a similar vein to LLMs naturally. See this person's
| blog about it [0].
|
| [0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-
| write-li...
| toyg wrote:
| _> stocatto_
|
| Staccato, which is Italian for "detached, separated".
|
| When I see simple Italian words used as technical terms in
| music or art, I think "oh, this must be what English speakers
| feel when they work in tech - a lot of common words becoming
| specific concepts in that particular field".
| biofaust wrote:
| Also, he is dangerously close to "stocazzo", which is
| similar to a very offensive way to say "fuck no!".
| eterm wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, I felt I hadn't got the word
| quite right.
| dgb23 wrote:
| The article felt honest and personal to me.
| noio wrote:
| I might have to reexamine my attitudes: the entire article felt
| AI-written to me, which instantly reduced my appetite for
| reading it.
|
| Which is unfair of course. A) I don't even know whether it was
| actually was written by AI and B) even if it was, it still
| encapsulates a human's potentially worthwhile thoughts and
| experiences.
|
| But.. undeniably genAI will lead to a much greater volume of
| text being written so we'll all have to be even more selective
| in what we read and what not?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I don't need an AI detector to see I dislike the AI-like style
| of the article, the bombastic extra-hype American-style self-
| brand LinkedIn-lingo.
| tasuki wrote:
| So what? Detecting whether content was produced by AI is
| impossible. Please stop shilling tools promising the
| impossible. The mentioned 99.98% accuracy is complete bullshit.
| zoobab wrote:
| I finally have a garage where i can weld my own bike frame!
|
| No more coding after 5pm!
| prmoustache wrote:
| Congrats and have fun. Oh and order those Paragon parts ASAP if
| you need them as they are closing shop!
|
| https://www.paragonmachineworks.com/
| zoobab wrote:
| I saw it, so sad.
|
| Nearly all the local frame builders were using their parts,
| especially the rear dropouts.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| The big problem starts when your job contract limits what you can
| do with your intellectual property. Then you can have. your shed,
| but you can't show it to anyone, you can't invite friends, you
| can't use to plan your future business etc.
| yuhoayu wrote:
| https://speakoala.com/
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > That's taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and
| applying it to a space where I had total freedom.
|
| Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every
| time.
|
| Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-
| grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate
| to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring
| corporate crap.
|
| I don't known how all of you "homelab" people put up with it. I
| have enough Linux boxes at work that demand too much care and
| feeding.
|
| The author has a good point but it really isn't a two-way street.
| The hobby stuff can feed into your career, but letting it go the
| other way is usually either counterproductive, or bad for your
| mental health.
|
| Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your
| career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.
|
| Tinker in your shed because it makes you happy, and brings joy
| and meaning to your life. You'll be more productive and, in my
| experience, you'll actually be more likely to learn something
| useful for work.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| I have a professional 'homelab' and a personal 'homelab'.
| You're 100% right, they can be a time sink. The important bit
| is to make sure the time is setup not 'maintenance' time.
|
| The trick is twofold: if it isn't 'declare and deploy' don't
| run it. If it isn't in your backup/restore pipeline don't run
| it.
|
| Pfsense and Home assistant are huge pains in the ass.
| Everything else is easy breezy.
|
| Proxmox/pbs/truenas/talos/linstor/DRBD are all amazing.
|
| I'm thinking about ditching pfsense for tailscale/cloudflare
| tunnels, but it's not worth the time atm. I don't have a viable
| alternative for HA.
| zrail wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what makes Home Assistant a pain?
| noirscape wrote:
| The trick is to not overengineer your hobby if you're only
| doing it to prove a point.
|
| ie. Yes, you could run a full on corporate CA, issue SSL
| certificates for your domains, manually rig up wireguard and
| run your own internal corporate VPN... or you just accept that
| your grand total of 1 concurrent user on an intranet is
| probably just better served by setting up Tailscale and a
| wildcard LE certificate so that the browser shuts up. (Which is
| still not great, but the argument over HTTPS and intranets is
| not for right now.)
|
| Same with other deployment tools like Docker - yes, there's a
| ton of fancy ways to do persistent storage for serverless
| setups but get real: you're throwing the source folder in /opt/
| and you have exactly one drive on that server. Save yourself
| the pain and just bind mount it to somewhere on your
| filesystem. Being able to back the folder up just with
| cp/rsync/rclone/scp is a lot easier than fiddling with docker's
| ambiguous mess of overlay2 subfolders.
|
| Every overengineered decision of today is tomorrow's "goddammit
| I need to ssh into the server again for an unexpected
| edgecase".
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'm actually grateful (today) for the lightning strike that
| nuked my old pile of servers at home. It freed me from the
| whole thing in one step. I was completely disabused of any
| notion that I had control over anything at that point.
|
| You might think you are protected with UPSes and what not, but
| nothing will stop the electromagnetic effects if it hits within
| a few feet. Every piece of copper is going to get lit up. No
| solution is 100% guaranteed here, but EC2 and snapshots is a
| hell of a lot more likely to survive a single event like that.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends
| 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home.
|
| For people who like doing other things, work already takes up
| most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to
| be much time for much else.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then
| spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home.
|
| Be careful of calling this an ideal employee.
|
| I, for example, tend to have a little bit of such a schedule,
| but what I work on at home is so much more exciting, making the
| job much more frustrating in comparison. Also, one is typically
| not allowed (or it is not possible) to apply all the really
| good ideas that one tested/implemented for the home projects at
| work.
|
| Thus, the kind of employees who apply such a pattern are often
| very, very passionate about programming - but this kind of
| passion often makes them
|
| - more frustrated at work (i.e. they might be cynical),
|
| - less subservient (they often know better - from their "night
| work" - that a requirement makes no sense, and may be vocal
| about it),
|
| - very opinionated about their "technological taste", not
| necessarily fitting the technological taste that the employer
| would love to see in the work (they have seen a lot more
| programming techniques).
| zenoprax wrote:
| Wow, this sounds familiar. The quality of work that can be
| done at home is often not realistic at work... and vice
| versa. I've learned to separate work and play pretty well and
| have enjoyed both worlds.
|
| The next step is keeping the homelab at arm's length from
| stuff you actually depend on. My pfsense router Just Works
| with tons of cool stuff on it but if I get the itch to push
| it a bit further... walk away and make a VM in the shed!
| mlrtime wrote:
| One thing I've learned: We all give the same execuse, "Not
| enough time". The two biggest I hear is working out and
| meditation.
|
| You have all the time in the world, what you don't have is
| priorities.
| arkey wrote:
| Yes, but also no.
|
| I have a prioritised list, it's simply that not everything
| fits inside the list, because my time is limited.
|
| Instead of "Not enough time" we could say "This is not high
| enough a priority".
| loa_in_ wrote:
| One can deprioritise health but what does it bring long time?
| I know it sounds cliche, so I will add that sometimes
| sacrificing health a little bit is worth pondering.
| vachina wrote:
| Yeah ideal employee indeed. Learning things at home to add
| value to the employer.
|
| But the skill and experience stick with you for lifetime.
| aledevv wrote:
| > _The shed is where you take the blueprints you learned on the
| job and actually get to play with them._
|
| > _You try something in the shed on a weekend because you're
| curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the
| documentation doesn't tell you. Then months later, when the team
| at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you're not
| starting from zero._
|
| These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.
|
| Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects
| are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What
| must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do
| something useful.
|
| My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into
| something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom
| to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of
| my own.
| mettamage wrote:
| Can we have a call about your dream? I am in a similar boat. My
| email is in my profile, and my comment history exists.
|
| No worries if this is a bit too forward. It just seems fun to
| brainstorm about a dream like this and we may have some
| complementary experiences.
| sailorganymede wrote:
| Can I get on this action too? This sounds like a good idea.
| calibans wrote:
| Glad to know I'm not the only one who hasn't unlocked any
| achievements in Shed yet
| amelius wrote:
| Most real projects are skyscrapers built on the foundations of a
| shed.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm retired (not really by choice), and spend _huge_ amounts of
| time, coding. I've written over 20 shipped apps (many have been
| deprecated and retired, though); mostly since retiring.
|
| I've had to drastically reduce the scope of my work, but not the
| Quality. Working alone, means smaller goals.
|
| LLMs are a game-changer, here. They are helping me to re-expand
| my scope. I'm not where I was, while getting paid, but I'm
| getting a lot done.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my
| backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too,
| brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh.
| Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to
| development of my shed.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have a shed, and I agree with the broad thrust of the argument.
|
| During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a
| mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that
| had the emotional stick of a bad workplace.
|
| However. I have mostly overcome that now. If you want to see how
| I built it: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/
|
| my most recent "finished" project is this:
| https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/despatchbox-pro/ which
| doesn't contain any electronics. This is unusual for me.
|
| The projects I am most proud of are:
|
| https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...
| Which is a clock using a tuning fork
|
| and https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-
| machin... which is a facsimile of a stock ticker
| morbusfonticuli wrote:
| Really cool project! Bookmarked for further inspection and
| future inspiration :-)
| parliament32 wrote:
| Your shed saga is a fantastic writeup, thank you for sharing.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I love this point, but also it seems to me that "not
| understanding the difference between a skyscraper and a shed" is
| perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking and talking about
| software development in general.
|
| Like, "is vibecoding good or bad?"
|
| Depends! Probably fine for a shed and terrible for a skyscraper.
| Or maybe there are some things within the skyscraper that might
| be vibecodable? I don't know.
| nchmy wrote:
| I don't have a skyscraper job, or even a low-rise, but I
| appreciate this article nonetheless as someone who has been self-
| learning how to turn a rickety shed project into perhaps a sturdy
| low-mid rise.
|
| I've gone down endless lengthy detours that often lead to dead
| ends, but I've learned an immense amount from the OS to CSS. It's
| finally coming together in a simpler way than I had previously
| envisioned. Hopefully this year it'll be ready.
| droidjj wrote:
| > No blueprints, no permits, no audits.
|
| Where I live, permits are required for all sheds, and for those
| above a certain size you have to submit blueprints.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| The advice to work on your own "shed" has really helped with my
| burnout during this AI age. I got into technology because I liked
| coding, building, and tinkering with systems. LLMs are great at
| coding and getting basic pipelines built, and I found myself with
| more pressures to be agent-first rather than hands on key-board
| at work. My side projects at home are where I've been able to
| find the joy for coding again.
|
| I recently wrote a small service to get a temperature LED panel
| on my computer case working. It required a proprietary program to
| pipe the sensor temps to the display, which only worked on
| Windows. Being on Linux (arch btw :P), there wouldn't be a way to
| get this to work. I had a lot of fun learning about how to
| reverse engineer the inputs/outputs the other software was doing
| and replicate it in Python.
| thecrumb wrote:
| I find the older I get - the more I want to work outside building
| a real shed.
| khoitsma wrote:
| What is the great attraction in software occupations to
| appropriate terms from the practice of architecture and
| structural engineering?
| dmoy wrote:
| I dunno, but it does seem a time honored tradition
|
| https://goomics.net/106
|
| Maybe because buildings are easy to describe the surface
| concepts to people without deep understanding of civil
| engineering or architecture or whatever, compared to other
| engineering disciplined like mech or chem or electrical.
|
| Everyone knows what a building foundation is and why it's
| important, but if someone starts talking to you about negative
| roots being necessary for a stable linear time-invariant
| system, most people's eyes are going to glaze over.
| alyxya wrote:
| Building a shed gives you a comprehensive understanding of the
| whole setup, which helps with building up a better mental model
| and intuition for the construction of a skyscraper. Otherwise
| it's easy to get lost with following standard procedures in
| building a skyscraper without understanding why certain things
| are done a certain way.
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(page generated 2026-04-08 23:01 UTC)