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I have also started learning Unity and I am making my first 2D game. No previous game development experience.
Having a lot of fun learning both.
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It’s definitely harder with kids, but I’ve actually used my kids as a catalyst for learning. There are loads of hobbies and activities I’ve taken up just as a way to expose them to the world.
Like what? Share some ideas, please.
Then last year at 49 switched from right handed to left handed guitar since I'm left handed and was never very good right handed. I've been practicing every day for at least an hour for 11 months now and enjoy it a lot.
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Like what? Share some ideas, please.
Geocaching is an easy hobby to learn (and much cheaper than it used to be for anyone with a smartphone) and gets you outside with the kids, who consider it a treasure hunt. It might be a little challenging during quarantine, but it’s a great way to get some exercise and explore the area around you.
It was a great opportunity to teach them some things and learn others too. Especially unusual things like washing houses (I do not know the English word for that, these are places people were coming to wash their clothes, usually a water source and stone washing places, under a roof). Their history was surprisingly interesting.
Yes - standup comedy. I’m 47. Started 2 years ago, background mostly “nerdy” and not hyper social. Have done some paid gigs and performed for crowds of up to 150. And at 38 learnt rock climbing ... got quite far with that until was stopped by an injury. Also more recently podcasting and literally today Adobe Audition. More nerdy I guess but still. Somehow programming is a good career to have a mindset of “I can learn…
wow, standup comedy. Performing anything in front of people is hard, comedy is even more harder. This is awesome. Did you follow any structure to learn comedy? Or are you a natural?
The pattern I’ve seen when people start standup seems to go like this ...
Extroverts who are comfortable in front of people tend to try to “wing it” and don’t prepare material.
Introverts (like me) tend to work harder on the material and actually having good jokes. This can be advantageous but you have to put the work in preparing. If you’ve ever done a talk at a conference or otherwise, that probably helps.
What’s interesting about comedy is it seems to exploit a “bug” in the way the human brain works. The most basic form of a standup joke is basically; 1. Create tension for the audience, 2. Release the tension with surprise
... there’s plenty of material online explaining this and I even read somewhere that there are only something like 21 possible joke structures to make a crowd laugh.
What I love about comedy is it’s a craft, much like programming. The goal is to make a room full of people laugh at the same time but there are so many variables that can influence that, there is no single solution to the problem... hence it’s a craft.
My partner and I have kids (7 and 4), with no family nearby to "hand over" the kids to. We're pretty much on our own. Somehow, with less time we accomplish more.
I suppose it's not a drastic change from my day-to-day (like learning a musical instrument, a dance, or a language), but it's new to me, and something I want to do more of in the coming years.
The ways I incorporate it into family time are: designing pen&paper games and playing them with the kids; designing levels/characters, and drawing/doodling with the kids; coming up with narratives/stories and telling them to the kids.
I'm a gamer. When my wife and I first got together, we played a lot of games together (Resident Evil on the sofa, Scrabble/Carcassonne at the pub). She works in TV and one of her first jobs was with Gamepad [1] (we're still good friends with Violet and family). So, the games runs deep, and I would love to spend more of my time making them.
Playing Go. It takes a lifetime to learn regardless of when you start--so you're not that bad off (tho they say it helps to start preschool).
I looked at Go, bought a few books. Gave up quickly because this is one of those things that would require way too much time. Kudos to anyone learning go, especially those who start late in life!
Edit: progress is weird though. Often hit a plateau and seemingly stuck there a long time, then for some seemingly inexplicable reason you advance. The strangest is when this happens while you're not playing and you return different/better than when you took a break.
The other thing I appreciate is that you can be good at whole board strategy or detailed tactical fights. The latter requires more thinking and the former you can get away (to a certain level) by developing intuition over time.
I started learning at PumpingStation One, Chicago's Makerspace, it turned out I really like turning metal into finished pieces and piles of chips. My nickname was "Metal Mike", I became the area host, and when a member's Dad needed someone to make gears, no experience necessary, I jumped at it, at age 53. If you bought a Marvel 18" bandsaw between 2016 and the spring, odds are I made the lower bandwheel that drives the blade.
I learned that making things with a precision of about the thickness of a human hair is relatively easy, in quantity. I know more about gears and gearing than I ever thought I could know... and that was only scratching the surface in 5 years. I will try hard not to assume something is easy in the future.
Since then, I'm trying to catch up, I want to go back into Programming, which I did before being a system admin for 15 years... my last major code was in Turbo Pascal for DOS. I did little side gigs, learning GIT, Python, a bit of C++/Arduino, MySQL, etc.
I've been reading everything I can, subscribed to /r/pascal, /r/programming and /r/programminglanguage on reddit where I answer a few and mostly read questions.
Hopefully, I'll be able to start earning a living in coding again soon.
[Edit] To answer a downstream question, we have a child, you have less free time, but more inspiration.