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The Joy of Small Projects

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Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#11

Post by hinkley »

dysoco wrote: post #6
m_herrlich wrote: post #3

I can barely finish a leetcode hard in a few hours, let alone something I would call a project. Still, this is an inspiring approach to tackling day to day work in incremental micro-projects.

Personally I find leetcode boring because it's not something that would motivate you to see finished; it doesn't have a "real" purpose, maybe trying to build something concrete (a little game, a little web app, whatever) might bring more motivation.

So far my experience with leetcode is that it is asking me over and over again to implement binary search of arrays (which is the wrong solution 95% of the time) and it wants, to charge me money for a debugger, and I have to write my own unit test framework from scratch if I want to avoid a debugger.

Everything that’s wrong with interviews, with rent seeking as the cherry on top.

I haven’t tried hard yet but I’m bracing for a shitshow.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#12

Post by hinkley »

la_fayette wrote: post #8

Last year I participated in the advent of code challenges. I remember a puzzle from day 16 [1], which took an afternoon or more . The idea is really great, however it seems quite hard to solve interesting problems in this short timeframe. [1]: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/16

If you did get good at this, all you’ve done is trained yourself to trust your own code over libraries. My suspicion is that experiences like this are the supervillain origin story for people with NIH syndrome.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#13

Post by dschroer »

dysoco wrote: post #10

I like the ethos behind this post; I've been struggling to finish projects for years, I get desmotivated, jump into another thing, don't finish it, come back after months now lost again, advance a little bit, drop it after a weekend, repeat, etc. I will try to use the framework presented here but I'm not sure exactly how to apply it, for example the project I've been meaning to finish is what I call a very dumb compi…

I have had this feeling a lot with my project. One thing that might work is break down the compiler itself into smaller projects. If you cant solve it all in a weekend try solving just a part of it and then calling that the project. Then move on to the next part. In the end up are building up to it without overwhelming yourself.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#14

Post by hinkley »

bambax wrote: post #7

Ok, maybe. Examples would help, though. Specifically: describing the process that goes from the big dream to the smallest implementation feasible in an afternoon.

Peter Norvig creating a tiny SAT solver for sudoku stands out as one of the most sophisticated examples of a “simple” application that I know. The last time that came up several people said they use that exercise to introduce themselves to new programming languages.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#15

Post by levmiseri »

One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io. A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing.

The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#16

Post by not-my-account »

This is great. The fact that there is an incredibly low marginal cost for software projects has been on the front of my mind for a while. Compared to working on something mechanical or electrical, you can get from "fuzzy idea" to "workable-ish code" with incredibly low cost in time and money.

I've learned a lot about browsers, for example, chugging away at a little toy website[0] with a buddy. I know it is simple, but it blew me away that I could dig into webkit to see why stuff worked the way it did. We are incredibly lucky to be digging into such an accessible field.

[0] http://legomosaicdesigner.com/

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#17

Post by dschroer »

levmiseri wrote: post #15

One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io . A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing. The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.

Very cool project. I love the fact that you did it in a weekend.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#18

Post by alin23 »

I’ve created the rcmd app switcher (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) in 2 days, going from statically assigned hotkeys in my BetterTouchTool config to a real menu bar app with dynamically assigned hotkeys for my most used apps.

A big part of that time was spent creating the icon, and copy pasting boilerplate code from my other app for the menubar UI.

Coding the main functionality of the app took little time and it still remains one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve completed.

Of course, I have invested a lot more time since then, especially in handling edge cases with odd keyboards, only because I wanted the app to be useful to as many people as possible.

But it could have stayed the way it was as well, where a 2-day project was still solving a problem thousands of people had.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#19

Post by t_sea »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #5

Meh... someone of us like the depth that comes from longer-term projects. Don't get me wrong, I've taken art classes that taught me to appreciate smaller, shorter things. And I think it's important to take that spirit into longer-term projects. But I think there's just a lot more "small" projects these days, what with the combination of APIs, funding, hackathon culture in engineering, and prototype culture in design.…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#20

Post by criddell »

not-my-account wrote: post #16

This is great. The fact that there is an incredibly low marginal cost for software projects has been on the front of my mind for a while. Compared to working on something mechanical or electrical, you can get from "fuzzy idea" to "workable-ish code" with incredibly low cost in time and money. I've learned a lot about browsers, for example, chugging away at a little toy website[0] with a buddy. I know it is simple, bu…

> Compared to working on something mechanical or electrical, you can get from "fuzzy idea" to "workable-ish code" with incredibly low cost in time and money.

That’s very true but I think the fact that my day job is in software development has pushed me to work on more physical projects on weekends.

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