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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

#41

Post by comfypotato »

Fradow wrote: post #35

If it's for fun, it shouldn't feel like work. While others have some good suggestion, I'm going to ask the hard question: do you really want to be coding as a hobby? The fact that you ask that question suggest you already code enough during work hours and you need to do something else after work. Did you used to code for fun before it was your work? Then maybe it's a good idea to accept that you are not going to find…

I’m still a little drunk off said kool-aid. I have a hard time distinguishing between work and play when it comes to hacking on my work environment.

The ideal fun coding session would emerge as a byproduct from a particularly successful work-related session. In reality, when coding during times I’m not being paid, I find myself with similar headaches to the workplace.

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

#42

Post by ilyt »

I have many hobbies from cars thru music, electronics and various computer-related stuff and I can say with certainty:

There will be always tedious parts, and there will be always unfun parts in anything worth doing. And it will always feel a bit like work.

About the only hobbies without that is passive ones like watching/reading and partially video games.

I did notice that I change what hobbies I engage depending on what I do in work (I work in ops where maybe 30-40% is coding, but I can go weeks coding, or not touching much actual programming at all), if I get some hard stuff to do in work I usualyl engage with other hobbies than programming and vice versa, when I've been stuck in meetings, planning and deploying at work I engage in programming more.

Keeping on one "stack" of libraries can help. I also have a template for new apps so I'm not held in minutia of writing logging again for the next app.

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

#43

Post by spcoder »

I enjoyed learning Clojure by playing https://spacetraders.io.

It's a game where you use their API to buy/sell ships, food, goods, structures for profit. You write code to plan trade routes, send out scouts, or whatever strategy you think will make the most money.

They reset the game every week and you can see how you're doing on a leaderboard. Good stuff!

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

#44

Post by animuchan »

I choose topics that are deliberately not work-like.

For example, one of my favorite online compos, js13kGames, is about writing small video games really fast. You pretty much have to reject all of the "best practices" from your typical working environment to have a shot at this: can't use established libraries (size restriction), very little time to do proper testing and CI, code compactness is more valuable than CPU cycles... The entire mindset is completely different.

For a person working in gamedev all of this would probably feel like work. Lucky bastards.

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

#45

Post by cranium »

I can code for fun on my "work" desk, but I need to clear the space of work-related items: any tab, terminal session, Slack/emails (!), IDE window, note, Docker container, VPN,...

For me, what separates work from fun is being able to focus on what makes you happy. When you work, you have constraints on both time and quality so your fun projects should feel liberated from those constraints.

If you like software craftsmanship and elegance, work on a project you can pamper and grow. Make it extensively testable and tested, optimize hot paths, implement a full CI/CD pipeline with blue/green deployment, architecture for extensibility,...

Or if you are like me and have a million things you want to try, pick one topic/use-case and aggressively strip its surroundings to a bare minimum. For example, when I want to play with a frontend framework I emulate the backend by hard-coding JSON responses. (When I can't do that anymore, a FastAPI server with no DB is very good for quick iterations.)

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

#46

Post by chrisallenlane »

I've been doing retro (Pico-8) indie game dev for about 2 years now, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's great because:

- It exposes me to entirely new classes of problems (pathfinding, graphics math, ai, etc), which are much more interesting than the daily CRUD nonsense.

- It forces me to branch out into adjacent interests and areas, like pixel-art, music composition, storytelling, etc.

- It provides a medium for self-expression.

- There's a well-trodden path for monetization (Steam, etc) if you're interested in that.

- It's fun to share with others! Nobody gives a shit about the Unix-y projects I typically work on, but people have actually been interested to hear about my game :)

This has really reinvigorated me. I do recommend checking it out if it sounds interesting to you at all.

Pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

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

#47

Post by mark_l_watson »

Well, it has to be fun. I caught the fun side projects bug when I first bought my Apple II (serial number 71, an early one) and wrote a simple Chess program that Apple gave away with their demo software cassette tape. I then wrote a Basic adventure game Valley of the Drawf that I gave away on America Online an a ton of people downloaded.

In another form: for the last 30 years, I have consistently spent about 10 hours a week of my own time (easy to do since I have just worked part time for almost my entire career) researching interesting tech, usually AI related. I write lots of small code experiments and a small percentage of these get cleaned up and used as examples in books I write. Again, this is all a lot of fun for me, and my wife participates by being my editor - something she also enjoys.

When to call it quits on hobby coding projects? When it gets to be what a friend of mine calls “negative fun.” An example: on Sunday I was scratching an itch writing something in Chez Scheme on my M1 Mac. It was a minor hassle getting everything installed but an hour later I hit a road block using bindings to sqlite3 - something that should be easy, but my compiled for M1/ARM Chez Scheme code kept trying to find and load Intel/X86 libraries. Could I have sorted this out? You bet I could but the process devolved into “negative fun” so I stopped.

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

#49

Post by iamflimflam1 »

piva00 wrote: post #34
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So far I've been using a lot of Adafruit components. Their 9-DOF breakout sensor board is really cool to keep track of small movements and I pair it with a WiFi enabled Wemos D1 for wearables. For my current project I'm creating vests with the 9-DOF sensor + Wemos D1 that connect to a central server and this server is a central dispatch to communicate with other stage parts (similar to the architecture of the Philips…

The emergence of things like MicroPython and CircuitPython have been an amazing game changer for what people can do in the embedded world. It's amazingly fun and feels different enough from day to day work to be fun.

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

#50

Post by iamflimflam1 »

My advice when coding for fun is to only take projects as far as you want to.

You don't have to do the final 20% if all you're trying to do is learn or prove to yourself that you can do something.

How much polish you apply to side projects is entirely up to you - you are the customer.

As others have suggested, embedded is a really nice area to get into, it is unbelievably easy to get started and it's different enough from day to day work.

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