41–50 of 140 posts
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…
None of this was that hard (outside of making it async-friendly, that was a little tricky), but it also wasn't trivial. I had Law and Order on in the background, and I hacked on it for a few days, and it did kind of get me into a "zen state". Figuring out how to make the code more flexible and figuring out which features I can feasibly add was relaxing.
I think part of it was that there's really no consequences to this. If I screw something up, no one is going to be mad at me, no one is going to yell at me, I'm not going to get fired, and I'm allowed to go off onto any tangents that I would like because I'm just doing this for fun. It doesn't feel like "work" because "work" often involves me working on stuff I don't want to work on. If something is too frustrating, I don't have to go through approvals and legal to import a library that does it for me. I can spend as much or as little time as I'd like writing documentation. I can micro-optimize or not-optimize however I'd like.
And fundamentally, if I screw something up, it's the text on the Swaybar, it's really not the end of the world.
It can be tough to find a project that holds my interest enough to get into this. I tend to have the most fun working on stuff that is completely unimportant, because if I'm not trying to change the world, then I can be as creative as I like.
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).
I'm currenlty juggling a few side projects, one of which is a game I've been tinkering with for 3 years. It's a pretty simple simulation of riding your bike through a city at night. It's never been anywhere near close to anything I could actually release, but I finally at least pulled together a gameplay video I could show off to my familiy and friends. They were all pretty impressed, and all wanted to know when I'd actually release it.
But I doubt I ever will. To me, making the game is my game, and I've tried to frame my side project work to my gamer friends that way. Sometimes it's giving myself new techncial puzzles to figure out, other times it's just letting myself zone out and get creative with world building, snapping together building facades like legos to build whatever crazy city I can imagine. It's so much fun.
Another is a web project that's much less fun and creative, but the more I tinker with it the more it turns into something that may actually be useful to others. And it may actually turn into something I can release and promote, and maybe even earn a little beer money with. I'm currently working up the motivation and courage to do a Show HN on that one here soon.
It almost pains me to say it (for reasons I can't even articulate well) but I've found LLMs to be tremendously useful in pushing through on side project work. I've lost track of how many projects I've spun up over the years and abandoned as soon as I got to the tedious parts you need to tackle if you actually want a marketable product (admin interfaces, user accounts, endless boilerplate html, etc, etc). With a competent LLM I can just delegate all the tedious crap and stay focused on what's actually fun for me. It's great.
I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.
Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a sanctuary
If I'm deeply engaged at work, I don't have many spare cycles out of hours and there's little happening - library updates and small fiddling.
Otherwise - it's full steam ahead on projects that I somehow magically find the time for.
I don't work on my stuff during work hours - disengagement from work results in more energy and motivation to do stuff out of hours.
Weirdly, I think this actually benefits those boring workplaces too. If I'm scratching the itch with what I'm doing on my side-project - it means I'm less likely to invent interesting new ways to over-complicate things at work.
It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I'm wasting time. This has lead to many, many side projects throughout the years, which I tend to like a zen garden[1]. Pruning, refining, improving, and sometimes rewriting. As soon as I work out the game mechanics of any game, I just see it as just content now, and there is not…
But when life is good, it's hard to stop tinkering. Weekend-sized projects are the best. For me, it's an urge to create and see the core 20% come to life, not to maintain the boring parts over time.
Hormonal fluctuations is an interesting theory. I always thought it's just a need for variety -- sometimes consuming (i.e. developing taste, curating, exploring), sometimes creating, sometimes relaxing. For me the cycle is months at a time.
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?
I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up around the GPU. For the first build, it took me probably a full day, but now I can strip and rebuild it in around an hour or two.
Also, the case - I had my heart set on the 2.1 case not the 2.5, since the 2.1 was a labor of love from the OG designer - It took freaking months to get my hands on the Titanium + Black version. My recommendation would be to favorite it on the Shopify store, and hit order the second you get the back in stock notification, they sell out in an hour or two.
I still screwed up my planning and had to get my custom cables remade to be shorter to give me more space, and had to deshroud my GPU to make it fit at the same time as the I/O headers.
I ordered both an air cooler and the AIO I now use, and tried both, in the end, I went for the AIO (accepting the higher GPU temps due to the radiator at the top), because I don't game as much and I want the 9950X3D to not throttle when doing Rust builds and other things that peg all cores at 100, and I didn't want to undervolt.
I can run the 4090 at full power, the PSU I have does amazingly well (Corsair SF750 SFX). However, I am switching it out for an SF1000 SFX soon, to give it a little more headroom, if I max out the CPU (170W TDP) and GPU (450W TDP), along with the other components, I am approaching the limits of the SF750, and it definitely couldn't handle a 5090 (a future project!).
Temperature wise, the 4090 maxes out at 60-70C for the games I play, and the CPU maxes out at around 80C for all-core workloads, idling at around 50C.
Not as good as a big ass desktop, but I came from a big ass desktop and I love this tiny dense powerhouse that is 6x smaller than my Fractal North XL predecessor :)
Photo (Logitech MX Master mouse for scale): https://imgur.com/a/lcS98IE
Best resources for this was the /r/FormD and /r/sffpc subreddits and Discord.
Parts list:
- CPU: AMD 9950X3D (originally a spare 7800X3D, 9950X3D was a recent swap-out)
- GPU: MSI Ventus 3X RTX 4090
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG X870-I (originally X670E-I)
- Memory: G-Skill Trident Z CL30 DDR6000 32GB (x2)
- SSD: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (x2)
- PSU: Corsair SF750
- Cooling Option 1 (not used): Thermalright AXP90-X47 (Full Copper)
- Cooling Option 2: CoolerMaster Atmos 240 AIO
- Custom cabling: Ordered from DreambigbyRayMOD on Etsy
- GPU deshrouding kit: Ordered from Osserva on Etsy
- Fans: All Noctua for quieter noise profiles
- Case: FormD T1 2.1 Titanium + CNC machined black side panels