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

- I built a nutrition app during the pandemic so I could learn more about nutrition and track my activity.

- I started practicing Qi Gong and Yoga and I hacked together a little handheld controller so that I could learn the movements more efficiently. I used it to rewind/fast forward, A/B repeat sections, speed up/slow down, etc.

- I built a trail companion app for a backpacking trip that helped me plan my hikes.

- I made an app for my grandma to share photos with her on her Kindle device.

I think when you apply coding to other things you're passionate about it brings new life to it.

I just choose a low-pressure project, but hopefully valuable to me or someone. Usually some kind of convenience or automation.

I have some "dashboards" with different key information on them. I like building those, scraping data from various sources, and winding up with this cool spot to look at everything.

I want to get into displaying things in the terminal, maybe the same dashboards. I really like running things on the command line; I've felt that way more than half my life now, hasn't gone away. Not sure why I've done so little programming for it.

Nothing important is purely fun. You'll find the "work" in the thing, and your brain will get testy.

Some people like to challenge themselves to use it to learn a new language, or do a different language each night. Some people write COBOL, assembler, you name it, there's someone trying to use it to solve the problems.

[1] https://adventofcode.com/

* https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs * https://www.masteringemacs.org/book * https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html