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The blissful Zen of a good side project

joshcollinsworth.com

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Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#21

Post by whartung »

I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.

One of them is a years long passion that consists of several, large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I’ll call about the 75% mark.

I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.

My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the span of 2 weeks.

It’s hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator as a baseline.

“Computers are deterministic!” Hah! Not this one!

But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#22

Post by lupire »

cafeinux wrote: post #20

I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course. Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki. One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML…

It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you. Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#23

Post by kevindamm »

cheschire wrote: post #11
pitched wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that

Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32, getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and... S…

Shout out to all those generous souls who posted how-to's and project notes for their IoT projects, so that machines could learn from them.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#26

Post by zeroq »

"The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements."

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#27

Post by condensedcrab »

sadcodemonkey wrote: post #9

I love this. My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experim…

I agree with that last bit - sometimes you gotta drop the time associated with polish of a finished product and play around.

Always stuck with me that pretty much every famous piece of art has a long backlog of practice to get to that point.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#28

Post by blatantly »

A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)

Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3 coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by Friday.

I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to familiarity.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#29

Post by esperent »

indemnity wrote: post #8

My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code. It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (995…

> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)

I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.

How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#30

Post by joshdavham »

cafeinux wrote: post #20

I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course. Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki. One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML…

> I decided to go for Python

Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).

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