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Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

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Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#12

Post by alanbernstein »

Most of my hobby coding is visual somehow. Shader art, procedural graphics, code-based infographics. Laser cutting and 3d printing. Ray tracers. Even microcontroller stuff, most of my projects with those involve blinkenlights.

It's more rewarding to me, and easier to show off to non-coders.

Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#13

Post by Tepix »

This reminds me of me playing TIS-100, a cool game by Zachtronics where you need to program a small parallel CPU in assembly (see https://zachtronics.com/tis-100/ - btw it's currently on sale at GOG, Steam and HumbleBundle).

At one point in the game i had to implement a sorting function or something like that and i noped out because it very suddenly felt like work.

Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#14

Post by etra0 »

For me, it's game hacking (not online cheating, though!).

Such a diverse topic where you can do a lot of stuff, learn a lot of stuff (x86 assembly, reverse engineering, etc) and you can achieve things like free-cameras, spawning npcs, and understanding how the game actually works at a lower level.

With that, I like to experiment with different languages, I started doing it in C++, moved to Rust, but I also tried Zig and Nim, and since they are all 'system programming languages', and you can interact with FFI, it means you can do fun stuff.

One of my latest projects was to spawn lights in a certain games because I know some folks that likes to take photos inside games, and it was such a fun project to understand how the game manages entities, how to spawn entities and how to control them using an injected imgui.

It feels nothing like work and it's very rewarding.

Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#16

Post by francisofascii »

I will get into a free form coding mode to get the thing working as fast as possible, which leaves you with long methods, poorly named variables, and hard coded settings, basically lots of code that would never survive a PR review. Getting out of the "someone else is going to look at this" mindset can make it more creative, faster, and more fun.

Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#18

Post by pizza234 »

It really depends on the nature of hobby coding.

I dedicate considerable time to "hobby coding", including open source, and once a topic - independently of the topic - reaches a certain depth, it becomes "work", and then, the only difference with the daily job, assuming a healthy work environment, is just the choice of the topic.

Documentation, test suites, orderly repository history are not just corporate frills. Once a project reaches a certain size, the developers are, in a way, users themselves. If an open source project is even mildly popular, chores will need to be performed, which includes taking care of the users (this is actually why a sad amount of open source projects ignores PRs and issues).

So if it feels like work, while I can't say with certainly, I believe that you've just experienced how hobby coding of a certain depth, is in real world.

Ultimately, the only answer I can give, is to choose the topic very carefully - one may find that the topic that really tickle them are fewer than one would think.

Re: Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work

#19

Post by redka »

I listen to music mostly when working on my own projects. I don't talk much about ongoing projects until I have already progressed very far, and when I do I'm deliberately keeping most of the plans and further ideas out of the conversation - I've realized that it's easy to reward myself too much by talking to someone so that afterwards a lot of motivation is not there anymore. I also try no to listen to suggestions too much since it does create some weird obligations in my mind. And, most of all, I try to not ever fall into the mindset of creating something with a specific goal in mind - I find that it's better to focus on the process itself and not on the final product. This means I often pivot ideas or completely abandon then in favor of something that became more interesting. Also, if you have that option, working in the same room with friends.
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