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The art of over-engineering your side projects

elsyms.com

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Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#191

Post by paulmd »

johnfn wrote: post #185
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

Yup, that's the yin and yang of programming. Programming is an art, but real artists ship.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#192

Post by D_Guidi »

paulmd wrote: post #191
johnfn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

Yup, that's the yin and yang of programming. Programming is an art, but real artists ship.

Yep, but artists don't ship every single portrait their made. Often, they experiment and they made practice

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#193

Post by imhoguy »

czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

There is also the third way -not to earn, not to necessarily learn, but simply to feel pleasure from making a software art and experimenting with things. When playing with my side project I feel like a painter adding new lines to the same canvas for years, like Gaudi spending his 15 years of life constantly redesigning Sagrada Familia. Well, I also learn stuff this way but often I get bored with them once challenge is completed ;)

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#194

Post by iamnafets »

johnfn wrote: post #185
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

This is mostly off-topic, but being able to identify or root out the value mismatches between people in a discussion (as you've done) seems like an essential ingredient to productive discussion.

I've noticed that people who can do this are disproportionately better at achieving their goals than those who can't, especially in engineering organizations. Exceptions of course for zealots and revolutionaries.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#195

Post by jeffdavis »

johnfn wrote: post #185
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

It's the same group of people, they just may be in different moods at different times.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#197

Post by superjisan »

iamnafets wrote: post #194
johnfn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

This is mostly off-topic, but being able to identify or root out the value mismatches between people in a discussion (as you've done) seems like an essential ingredient to productive discussion. I've noticed that people who can do this are disproportionately better at achieving their goals than those who can't, especially in engineering organizations. Exceptions of course for zealots and revolutionaries.

Wow! This made me think deep thoughts man.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#198

Post by frenchie14 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #114
elsyms wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A customer will not know or care if you are using Ruby, Go, PHP or any other language as long as what you have written is performant and is fit for purpose (which all modern languages are)." Where games are concerned I'd tend to agree (though Minecraft was built in Java and was TERRIBLE for the first couple of years, now look at it).

These days, Java is on the faster side of languages in common use. At least it wasn't written in JavaScript or Python!

You can make fine games in Python. See Eve Online: https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-pyt...

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#199

Post by scottlocklin »

0xfaded wrote: post #189
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

Totally agree. I had a problem which required finding the minimum distance between an ellipse and a point. If that had been my day job I would have settled for Newton's method and hacked around the regions of bad convergence. Instead I spent a week developing to be what I still believe to be a novel numerical method that is much more stable over all regions. Turns out I was wrong in some earlier maths, and the curve…

Can't you just use vector math for this?

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#200

Post by markcerqueira »

shardinator wrote: post #175
markcerqueira wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "This person probably has no side projects to play with" Exploring new technologies that could be beneficial (or harmful) to the company shouldn't be a side project. Perhaps we can shift the thinking from "this person doesn't have time for side projects" to "how can we make exploring new technologies a part of the job?"

Or just say 20% of your time you can do what you want. Seems like a solved problem to me.

Having a solution to the problem and having people advocate for implementing that solution in their companies are too different things.

We know about lots of best practices but if no one is advocating for them at their companies those practices we'll just be shining cities on a hill that we look to from a deep, dark valley.

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