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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

#121

Post by didgetmaster »

I feel like there are two kinds of side projects. One type is a small project that can be coded up in a short time (a weekend or a few evenings). It reaches a functional stage rather quickly and only takes a few hours to fix bugs or improve the user experience.

The other type is much bigger and can take months or even years. New features are added from time to time, but must also fit into a well defined architecture.

Both types can be satisfying but require different approaches. The first gives you a bunch of different projects that get shuffled around and easily abandoned. The second requires more discipline as you continually build upon previous layers.

Since they are both side projects, you can go weeks without looking at them or spend all your spare time on them for extended periods.

I have a side project that I have dabbled with for a decade. There are months where I get many features working and others where I barely look at it. It just depends on what else is happening in my life at the moment.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#122

Post by MattSayar »

I love this, and yes can completely relate. The last side project I got absorbed into[0] completely consumed me for a weekend. I was driven like a man possessed to finish it before Monday. I had to leave the house and stake out a corner in a coffee shop to concentrate. The scope of the project was perfect: it was small enough to do in a weekend, I was building something I needed, and something that could help others. Creating something is so much fun, especially when you have a long-lasting way to share it like your own website.

I know people disparage LLMs for not building any serious code. Yes it's only a hobby project and not a production system, but my little project really would never have left the ground without it.

[0] https://mattsayar.com/i-didnt-want-to-pay-for-a-newsletter-e...

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#123

Post by didgetmaster »

Globz wrote: post #110
wonger_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've noticed that when I have lots of stressors, I don't have any creative energy. I have to give myself permission to let go, that it's ok to forget about a side project. It's more important to focus on self-care and tackling irl problems at that point. 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…

I’ve noticed this trend in my life where during winter times my consumption goes way up and as soon as spring time is here then my creativity crawls back from hibernation and I quickly regain motivation to continue my side projects. I wish I could be 100% focus year round but for some reason it very hard to keep the inner flame of creativity going during winter times. At least I did noticed this pattern and being awa…

In some ways we are just like plants. Direct exposure to fresh air and sunlight will greatly contribute to a burst of energy and focus.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#124

Post by gdubs »

I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have in my career came because my side projects were interesting and sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's so much specialization in our era – being able to connect dots across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a superpower.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#125

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

keyle wrote: post #39

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…

This is how I am except with nostalgia content, which I cannot see as just content.

It is however impossible for me to play the latest games or watch the latest shows for 10 minutes without feeling like my time is being wasted.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#126

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

kevindamm wrote: post #23
cheschire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RIP to those generous souls

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#128

Post by Cyphase »

aloha2436 wrote: post #98
ripped_britches wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be obviously ridiculous if it granted the parent commenter so much productivity? Perhaps the same obvious ridiculousness that manual agrarians passed upon the tractor.

Vibe coding is not using a chat interface to explore an unfamiliar domain like GP describes, it's letting an agent tool like Cursor or Goose do most of the work semi-independently.

Vibe coding is not looking at the code, essentially. See what Simon Willison has written about it (the original term was coined[0] by Andrej Karpathy): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

[0] Only two months ago!

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#129

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

aaarrm wrote: post #40
keyle wrote: post #39

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…

I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment. Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious about what I should be doing with my time instead.

I'm in the same boat.

I'll say LLMs have influenced this for me. I've lost some part of what made programming "interesting".

Sure, digging through docs and finding small-scale workable examples to for boillerplate/whatever was never fun, but a lot of what drew me to programming was the wading into the unknown and the satisfaction of figuring things out (often even "chore" type things).

I'll keep looking for a new hobby, I guess.

Related, I feel like programming jobs are on the way out, one way or another (at least for me); programming recreationally had the side benefit of increasing marketable skill--this was never a primary or even secondary motivator for me, but now seeing as it's benefit in that realm seems far smaller, I've also lost motivation there.

Maybe I'll feel a bit better as the weather improves.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#130

Post by devmunchies »

Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.

The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.

If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.

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