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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

#21

Post by piva00 »

I've started to play with microcontrollers and other embedded systems to create tools for performance artists.

It was a path from a very long soul searching effort. After some 18 years of professional career as a SWE I was really tired of anything related to programming. Finally I got to find something that actually motivates me to learn like it was when I was a young kid and programming was a fun and creative hobby.

I got into it after meeting so many incredible people in circus, dance and other performing arts and watching them struggle to make their dream projects come true due to a lack of technical software/hardware skills and lack of money to hire specialists for their projects. It gives me a lot of joy to get into their creative processes and dream together the possibilities, to push my skills to areas I had never worked with and to actually provide value to a community of artists, to be part of a creative process is also pretty magical to me.

Before this I went through a long lull of motivation to code anything outside of work, to study anything related to programming outside of work needs. I don't get any joy anymore from dreaming about apps and products that I could sell, they all just seem like a boring job on top of my job. Actually creating something related to the arts has been very, very refreshing to my soul.

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

#22

Post by varrock »

pizza234 wrote: post #18

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. On…

On this note, contributing to open source was the best "experience" I've ever gotten as it related to my day-to-day job of maintaining a large, but still growing, project.

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

#23

Post by nisegami »

I recently made a web app for myself as a hobby coding project. Part of what made it tolerable was not doing any of the stuff that makes the web apps I make at work more tedious, like audit logs or even an account system. It really hammers home the idea that it's _for me_ above all else.

>being on a desk in front of a computer still feels like work

Ultimately I couldn't get past this, even for gaming. I got a Steam Deck instead and mostly just use that and/or a tablet with a holder in my bed now.

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

#24

Post by koromak »

Tepix wrote: post #13

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.

God the endless struggle of a Zachtronics game. I'm in love with this, but it hurts me to play.

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

#25

Post by cpach »

t-3 wrote: post #6

If something feels like work, don't do it. If you want to do it anyway, do it with a level of detail and attention that you wouldn't be allowed on the clock. Write your code on paper, write assembler, make radical choices and do stupid things just because. Play with microcontrollers and build something physically real. Roll your own crypto and design your own networking protocols. Restrict the length of your function…

“Write your code on paper”

From time to time I write code/pseudocode on paper. It can be lots of fun! And it can help one to think about the concepts/semantics without the immediate stress that the code needs to run/compile ASAP.

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

#26

Post by nuclearnice1 »

piva00 wrote: post #21

I've started to play with microcontrollers and other embedded systems to create tools for performance artists. It was a path from a very long soul searching effort. After some 18 years of professional career as a SWE I was really tired of anything related to programming. Finally I got to find something that actually motivates me to learn like it was when I was a young kid and programming was a fun and creative hobby.…

Brilliant! What’s your tool chain in terms of hardware and libraries and so on look like?

I imagine your skill set is very rare in that community.

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

#27

Post by thomascgalvin »

Working on my hobby code does feel like work, but it feels like the parts of work that I enjoy.

The drudgery of my job comes from all of the stuff surrounding the code: tickets, meeting, code reviews, meetings, time cards, meetings. When I work on my hobby code, all of that goes away, and I can just code.

Sometimes it's frustrating. Sometimes I'll bang my head against a problem for a few hours, or a few days, then have a sudden "a-ha" that makes everything work. That is agitating in the moment, but the "a-ha" makes it worth it.

It also helps that the domains of my work and hobby code are completely separate. When I write code for fun, there's no enterprisey stuff going on. Right now I'm working on some code that generates character sheets for an RPG. There's no database, no Keycloak, hell, there isn't even a server. It feels a lot more like the toy code I wrote in college than the professional code that pays my bills.

If your hobby code doesn't bring you that kind of joy, you might be better off finding a different hobby? We don't need to chain ourselves to an IDE 24/7.

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

#29

Post by vga805 »

I find hobby coding to be more fun and rewarding when I do it with other junior developers. I used to teach coding and I've kept up with and continue to mentor some former students so if one of them has a project idea or they want to practice algorithms or learn some framework and they want some help I'll pair with them. Recently I went back out on the job market so as I study some more advanced algorithms I'll invite them to code with me.

I love teaching, I always have fun doing it. So the hobby coding ends up being fun and rewarding. Sometimes they'll come up with an idea that I quite like, so the aded outside creativity also makes it fun. Some ideas recently we might even release at some point, this also adds a bit of excitement.

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