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I just want to code (2023)

zachbellay.com

151–160 of 183 posts

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#151
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs? I absolutely do. Money and power is a great motivator. I don't feel bad about any of it. I took my shot and continue to do so. >What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it? It was…

[flagged]

You've made a whole lot of assumptions in that reply, all from 10 sentences. Maybe ask some questions next time instead of making assumptions that fit your preconceived notions. Your intuition is a bit off.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#152

Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs? What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it?

Some of us do. The hobby may consist of simulating the professional experience, but to a limited extent and on our own terms. For instance in my own case, I play an instrument -- the double bass -- and I perform sporadically. When I practice at home, I'm aware of the qualifications and competency of a professional bassist, I measure myself against those standards, and try to keep improving.

This doesn't detract from the pleasure of playing, at all. If anything, it gives me some structure and motivation. And I still don't mind noodling for a while when I need a distraction that doesn't involve a screen.

But I only count the money that I make, because I have to report it. ;-)

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything thats remotely disruptive requires the same deep connections. Tech just doesnt have many opportunities left.

Working at a start-up now and seeing how many partnerships are solely due to connections of the CEO or a random board member is crushing. The tech side is an entirely and relatively easily solvable problem in comparison to the rest.

And?

Those connections didn't materialize out of thin air, you know. Your CEO/random board member had to meet people, understand what they do, keep those connections alive, etc.

Why can't you do the same? Start now and in five years you'll be a lot more connected than you are at this moment. This is also an entirely solvable problem.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything thats remotely disruptive requires the same deep connections. Tech just doesnt have many opportunities left.

Set a reminder for 10 years from now. Let's see how many incredible new tech products have been built. My guess is that ~any judge will decide that it turned out there were a lot of things still to be built

Right? I'm willing to bet that people have been saying this in one form or another for the last thousand years or so.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#155
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the author's point is that, specifically if you are _coding_ for fun, it is much harder to "turn off" that part of your brain that analyzes it from a business perspective. It's not as if you can close one IDE at 4 and open another IDE at 4:01 at put yourself in a different mindset.

I do just that by switching colour schemes. Light mode at work, dark mode at home. It takes a little bit, but the brain is easily tricked by flashy lights.

That’s great!

Also - coffee at work, tea for play

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#156
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> share as well to feel good about it. But I wish to share, but not to helicopter parent. I've long felt this case ill served, from 1995 Perl CPAN's "you own the package name" (vs author -packagename-version triples), to 2025 github's impoverished support for communities of forks. No "past me wrote this; present me frees it to jam; future me isn't involved - play well together, and maybe someday I'll listen in or dro…

That's only with GitHub. There are other platforms, obviously less popular, which don't take that approach. Heck, most of the "real" free software world (the one building entire operating systems, desktop environments, programming languages, games... other than Linus with Linux) operate in that manner. I am always perplexed when people ask me about my GitHub account for my opensource contributions: I point them at wh…

https://openhub.net/ . Other platforms?

Any platforms emphasizing rendezvous? Like... Let me know whenever someone on my commits a new project, or is looking for help. Any meet-and-hacks later today, anywhere on the planet, which welcome virtuals? Happy to do 20 minutes of pair programming now - you know my profile - is anyone around? Text me whenever a flash-mob hackathon gets going. Notify me whenever code, any language, seeks help with . Using my profile-3, find me a couple of candidate tickets for later. ... Sort of AI-facilitated social networking for humans and code.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#157

Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs? What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it?

I will preface this by saying that, I decided to stop pursuing a job as a software developer because my 2 years of work experience mean nothing in the job market. Now that I ended up finding a job as a waiter (of all things) I finally enjoy learning new things again. Before, I would get chronically stressed researching the job market, gathering keywords from job openings, consuming Udemy courses at 2x speed, using AI…

I am a firm believer that the brain has finite resources. It is fundamentally no different than a muscle, in that, the muscle has resources at its disposal, and using those resources causes them to deplete faster than they can recover. This means, that at best, you can optimize how you use your brain, similar to how you can optimize how you use your muscles. You can train, to get "more" out of your brain, similar to muscles. But at the end of the day, there is only so much your brain can do. I have found, through fairly good time keeping, that I can do ~6 hours of deep work in a 9 hour period. Maybe 7 in a 12 hour period. This is the amount that puts me at the edge of burnout, and requires no other commitments in my life. 4-5hours in a 7.5 hour day is sustainable. Others may be able to do more, or less than this, but many people are fooling themselves if they think they are doing good work that is also deep for more than this, for more than say 4 weeks at a time.

That said, if you can find ways to use very different parts of your brain... well, then you can squeeze out more performance. In the same way that in the gym, if you find exercises that isolate different muscle groups, you can squeeze more sets in throughout your workout.

I have seen this with people who can produce a lot of output, they tend to not do the same thing all day, but find ways to work on unrelated projects. So, I'm not terribly surprised that you have an urge to code now that your brain is focused on non code related things for a large part of your day.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#158
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs? I absolutely do. Money and power is a great motivator. I don't feel bad about any of it. I took my shot and continue to do so. >What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it? It was…

[flagged]

> I can teach someone who knows how things work how to glue libraries together when/if we do need it, but I can't teach someone who glues libraries together how to make their own things; it's simply not worth the time or effort because it's effectively like starting from scratch and I may as well start with a complete junior in that case.

I just want to point out that this goes beyond an argument explaining how hobby projects can be useful and enters the territory of personal attack. I presume you mean that whatever they made is substandard in some way ("[gluing] libraries together" is nonsense criticism; everything in software is someone's abstraction) but I don't see why you would think that.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#159

Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs? What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it?

I do both of those, it's a constant battle in my own head. I'm always reminding myself that it's ok to make music just for my own enjoyment, and that don't need a potential monetary angle for some hobby.

I'm not justifying this mindset, which preceded LinkedIn. I don't like it.

Re: I just want to code (2023)

#160
Sounds like a conflict between wanting to do something you love, and wanting success and fame. Nothing wrong with either of these things, or trying to have both. But what you might be missing is that the way you pursue these things has a much larger impact on the outcome than simply whether you make an attempt or not.

You might have been reading all those stories of startups, and now you're stuck in a box shaped like all those stories. That you have to start a startup at all, or that you have to go about it in the way those stories told. You might think that's your only path. But the only limits in this world are the ones we put on ourselves.

Meditate on what you really want, at your core. Start the wheels turning of thinking of ways to get those things that aren't immediately obvious or don't seem likely. Consider a world in which you didn't have fear, doubt, anxiety, or other kinds of limitations. Which path would you choose? What are all the ways you might use to walk that path? You don't need to know the whole path to start walking on it.

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