Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
81–90 of 147 posts
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#82Do something else. My God there is so much that needs to be done outside of software, no one is doing it, and civilization is turning into shit because of it.
If you need us to give you the secret sauce to doing software without feeling bored or overwhelmed, I hate to break it to you, but there is no secret sauce. Roll with that.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#83There are a couple of good comments, so I won't repeat what they said.
Find something you are actually passionate about. It doesn't have to be a big thing. You shouldn't care if it is a cool thing, or what other people think of it.
When I'm interviewing, I love when people showcase stuff they enjoyed building, rather than something bigger they made following a tutorial.
Here is an example of a really small project I enjoyed working on - https://muffinman.io/vertigo/ It was so fun, and I learned some canvas/svg stuff I never touched before. Even now when I look at it, it brings a smile to my face.
Another thing I think you should do is to document the whole process and write one or series of blog posts. It will help you understand the whole thing better, and help people in similar situation.
Good luck and please share with HN whatever you end up making!
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#84I wouldn’t worry about the popular hipster stacks, but rather shoot for something productive and preferably slow moving. There is a reason things like Django or Ruby on Rails help people actually get things out the door. They come with a lot of batteries included, and while it may not be the hip (or even smartest) way to do things, that doesn’t really matter nearly as much as getting shit done. stacks like Flask or a…
Is there a better term for "hipster stack"? Rails and Django were most certainly considered hipster when they first came out.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#85I wouldn’t worry about the popular hipster stacks, but rather shoot for something productive and preferably slow moving. There is a reason things like Django or Ruby on Rails help people actually get things out the door. They come with a lot of batteries included, and while it may not be the hip (or even smartest) way to do things, that doesn’t really matter nearly as much as getting shit done. stacks like Flask or a…
Is there a better term for "hipster stack"? Rails and Django were most certainly considered hipster when they first came out.
> Is there a better term for "hipster stack"?
Javascript eco system.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#86I wouldn’t worry about the popular hipster stacks, but rather shoot for something productive and preferably slow moving. There is a reason things like Django or Ruby on Rails help people actually get things out the door. They come with a lot of batteries included, and while it may not be the hip (or even smartest) way to do things, that doesn’t really matter nearly as much as getting shit done. stacks like Flask or a…
Is there a better term for "hipster stack"? Rails and Django were most certainly considered hipster when they first came out.
Yeah, that was before they we’re cool and other devs probably hadn’t heard of them yet...
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#87I know how you feel.
It takes time to design interesting work. People often say follow your passions but sometimes the passion requires a brief period of tedious exploration while you set things up.
Through trial and error, you can slowly sketch out a landscape of interesting problems, like glossy monuments rising above the horizon. That’s how it feels anyways when you finally start making some progress; when you finally have fun problems to work on.
But in the beginning you almost have to guess what you think will be interesting. And there’s no guarantee it’ll be useful, but I’ve found a lot of times, the experiences and lessons you’ve learned in one project sets you up for the next.
Usually the things that annoy you the most tend to be the best starting places for interesting problems. And it’s important they’re interesting because it’s easy to lose motivation on things you don’t think are important. Then you’ll feel so guilty for not working, you’ll start working on uninteresting problems just so you can be productive (and that’s when the real trouble really starts). Because tedious, boring labor that slowly invades your life isn’t much different from slavery, the major difference being it tends to be more abstract and invisible.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#88Subscribe to and watch destroy all software by Gary Bernhardt. It will teach you skills that are applicable to any stack and more importantly, watching him program will show you what us possible in terms of craftsmanship.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a better term for "hipster stack"? Rails and Django were most certainly considered hipster when they first came out.
> Is there a better term for "hipster stack"? Javascript eco system.
You made me laugh, but it is unfair.
vue, (p)react and angular all have a better frontend development experience than you'd have with Django/rails.
It just increases your tech stack from one component by at least 3 (webpack, nodejs, frontend-lib like vue/(p)react/angular )
And that is sometimes more than it's worth.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#90Start small. Way smaller than you think is reasonable. Nothing saps motivation like overly ambitious projects (read: 99% of projects) where it takes you forever to get to any sort of milestone. Every time I work on anything that takes longer than a few weeks I regret it.
Build something you can get actually get to the "end" of in a trivial amount of time, ideally just a few days. Avoid using lots of APIs or adding a bunch of features. Make it simple at first, then iterate on that.
For example, Indie Hackers started as just a blog. I built and designed it in less than week. A few months later I added a forum. That was about 8 days from idea to release. Both were barebones MVPs.
Also, you seem super focused on tech stacks. I don't think it matters nearly as much as you think. Just pick something, follow their official tutorial, and stick with it until it's familiar.