Try using bubble to build your prototype. https://bubble.io/
It might be something that helps you
Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
111–120 of 147 posts
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few questions, as I don't know AWS much beyond basic VMs. - Is all this easy to do following their docs, are we talking 1 h setup or 1 day? - Cost: how much are we talking per week/month? (assuming no traffic but yours)
The setup was pretty straightforward with tutorials galore and it's rediculous cheap, the most expensive part is the route53 stuff as it costs a buck a month or something like that to route a domain. Well, I bought a few domains too so those are like 15 bucks a year (I got them from a random registrar, not aws). Don't get me wrong though, it won't be a path of roses, aws error messages sometimes make no sense whatsoe…
Wow, that is everything I asked for and more; thanks a lot for taking the time and effort to summarize all this. Now I feel like I can get started with this tomorrow.
Couple remarks:
> CORS
Oh, that may save me lots of time... Seems related to http headers at first Googlance? These bit me in the past (in middleware and backend apps) and I still don't have a solid grasp of when I should use which.
> dynamodb
I'll probably do the same as you then.
I've got hobbyist hardware at home (behind 1G fiber) so I usually use that as a lab — I still have to make a 'serverless' platform though — so anything too expensive I can balance back 'on-prem'.
I need to learn AWS anyway (who doesn't, I figure, if you intend to CI/CD as small/one-man team). Glad I can go the serverless path to get my feet wet!
Thanks again.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#113Something I have found really great is to purposely build something you will never ever even be remotely tempted to ship but that has some degree of complexity to it. What's great about this approach is you are never forced to be bogged down in details that aren't relevant to you.
If you ship a product and I mean like really try to ship it with a launch and everything, you will spend a tonne of time on a) non-technical tasks that don't matter to your day job and b) technical tasks that don't matter to your day job.
For example graphic design, copywriting, marketing etc. All great stuff if you want to go the route of actually trying to launch a company. Terrible to get caught up in if you just want to learn to write production grade systems.
Technical tasks you have to spend time on for stuff you actually will ship do have some value but really it can be limited. You might spend time to build deployment pipelines or auth or HA deployments etc. All of that stuff is great IMHO and I personally value having done a lot of it but to a lot of engineers who work on established code bases and just never ever touch that stuff I feel like it's not a huge value add.
With a project you know you'll never ship you can focus only on the parts you want to. You can then layer lots of little mini-projects into it and use it to try out new things over time.
I guess I'd recommend trying to ship a real project solo at least once too. It gives you perspective.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#114Building something w django is easier than bug fixes (imho). Django is just that well documented and easy to use. Bugs, of course, are not. If you want to write code, for your features, just write it in your view (this is what django calls the controller). Maybe it should be written somewhere else, but in my projects I wrote most of the logic in views, and if you are using other libraries/apis, you can just follow their docs or use stackoverflow. If you go down this route you will, at the minimum, learn a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#115I think you need to ignore the projects you are trying to do and instead work on getting a decent CI/CD workflow setup, preferably with strong automation driving it. The reason I say this is that it sounds to me like you are a victim of lots of unfinished projects that probably never got running properly in dev, let alone in a deployed environment. I've been there and I know it's very demoralizing to work on something and not close the loop on it, and to be staring at a mass of code that didn't go anywhere. I fixed this in my own projects by starting to treat my side coding as proper development work. I put together a Jenkins container with pipelines that test/build/deploy my code automatically. I actually write tests and spend real time on architectural decisions that I might not have cared about if I was just hacking. The result has been that I'm a stronger dev now, much more professional and productive in my workflow, and my side projects are actual software that builds green and deploys. It took me like a month of side time to set that container up like I wanted it, but it has completely changed how I feel about my work. I take it seriously now. Give this a shot if this sounds right to you, I think it could help. Best of luck:)
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#116> but every time I start I get overwhelmed with what stack I should use, and how to actually get a ‘real’ application out. It’s hard to explain. I have a lot of anxiety and analysis paralysis about this.
don't we all suffer from Imposter Syndrome in one way or another?
Why not try to go back to the basics. Don't beat yourself up, or pressure yourself. I would do research on a specific stack I like first and what I want to learn more about. Then dive into that very deep. The more I learn about the stack the easier it is to find ways to apply the stacks advantage in specific use-cases. Then try to build something based on that. It's sort of the reverse what I would "normally" do, but more fun because I allow myself to tinker and make mistakes (or do something outrageous, just for the sake of proofing it's possible to do it with that technology). Usually the decision what I build automatically emerges in that process.
if unsure if floating or swimming why not float[1] for a while?
[1] from Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
> And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
ps: for me one of the most soul crushing and mind-numbing things is having to wrap some fragile REST endpoints into my app. Doing so can quickly get results and I understand why people do it, but in a side project I rather learn what a specific IETF/RFC or academic paper is about and then do something with that. The experience/knowledge from that is IMO much more valuable than being able to hammer out 3rd party API's in whatever language.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#117You are in a position extremely comparable to one I've been in myself. I had the same feeling about my jobs, also hadn't worked for awhile, considered myself lazy/coasting, wanted to get hobby projects going but had trouble. So, having had success with my hobby projects in the sense that I reached my technical/product goals and then ended up landing a great tech job off of them, here are my thoughts, in no particular…
I think this is a really good set of advice. In your situation, I would second going with React and some sort of node backend
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#118I 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 fin…
> Instead of ‘finding your passion,’ try developing it, Stanford scholars say
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/06/18/find-passion-may-bad-ad...
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#119In my city, the programming unemployment rate is, like, 2%. If you haven't worked for awhile, it's because of your job hunting skills, not your tech stack. So, if having a job is reason you ask this, my answer is: read some books about job hunting. Don't worry about programming right now.
But, and I think, more importantly, you are taking this way too seriously. Programming is fun. Write something fun. Me? I think NodeJS and VueJS are fun. Write a node app that draws ascii images in your terminal. Or, figure out how to store stuff in a database (Mongo is also fun). Wire up a VueJS app that accesses it. (Then throw it all out. Your first is never good enough to keep.)
OR, go to Glitch.com and party around there. It's a very sociable place to do some coding and engage with other people who want to program. Lots of ideas there. You can pick up Node apps and extend them. That's a lot of fun.
OR, do CodeWars.com. Pick your favorite language and do some exercises. If you aren't inspired after a week of doing that, find another profession. You're not a programmer.
OR, read GitHub. As before, if you aren't inspired after a week concentrating on the cool things other people do, forget about programming, it's not in your blood.
But you will. Programming is the most fun you can have. It has all the ingredients. Always new. Good results. Fun community. You can do it alone and sitting down.
And relax.
Re: Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
#120In my city, the programming unemployment rate is, like, 2%. If you haven't worked for awhile, it's because of your job hunting skills, not your tech stack. So, if having a job is reason you ask this, my answer is: read some books about job hunting. Don't worry about programming right now. But, and I think, more importantly, you are taking this way too seriously. Programming is fun. Write something fun. Me? I think No…
you can be working as a developer without 'working'