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Writing toy software is a joy

blog.jsbarretto.com

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Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#131

Post by eikenberry »

zffr wrote: post #112
roughly wrote: post #11

One of the best things that I’ve done for myself, career-wise, came during a 6-month sabbatical between jobs. I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to do, but I kept finding myself stymied by scope creep - when you don’t have any constraints, it’s hard to decide how big a project should be, and the projects would grow to these massive unfinishable beasts. I decided to constrain myself to one week per project - what…

Out of curiosity, how did you end up with 6 months off between jobs? I would love the opportunity to take ~6 months off, but I feel scared that if I just quit, it might take me a longer time to find a job again.

It took me 8 months of active shopping to find a job w/ 25 years of experience. Unless you are really good at interviewing with an interesting resume, I'd suggest caution until the job market recovers.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#132

Post by snackbroken »

dakiol wrote: post #39

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…

The few times I've used LLMs as question answering engines for anything moderately technical, they've given subtly-but-in-important-ways incorrect information such that taking them at face value would've likely lost me hours or days of pursuing something unworkable, even when I ask for references. Whether or not the "references" actually contain the information I'm asking for or merely something tangentially related has been rather hit or miss too.

The one thing they've consistently nailed has been tip-of-my-tongue style "reverse search" where I can describe a concept in sufficient detail that they can tell me the search term to look it up with.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#133

Post by diegomacario »

I did this for years to learn computer graphics. I spent so many weekends and evenings building weird things that never made me a single dollar, but all the knowledge I gained eventually led to the job of my dreams. Here are some of the weird things I built:

- Tiny ray-tracer: https://github.com/diegomacario/Super-Sunshine - 2D rigid-body simulator: https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics - Character animation system: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Experiments/public/... - Animation curve visualizer: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Magic/public/index.... - Motion capture playback in the web: https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index...

That's a mountain of code that served one purpose: to gain knowledge.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#134

Post by imchillyb »

heroku wrote: post #17

Reinventing existing software has 0 merit. If you cannot be creative enough to invent new things, you shouldn't bother working.

That philosophy has some lingering halitosis of truth to it.

Any inspection of any economy suggests otherwise. How many tire manufacturers are out there? How many different brands, styles, and types of tire? How many total US Dollars per year are those companies sharing?

How about oil changes? Car washes? How about car wax?

New doesn't equal profitable. Making a different product, or service, is where most of the profits on earth sit.

Wanna be a rebel and broke? Then by all means follow the new-new and barely break-break even.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#135

Post by burntalmonds »

dakiol wrote: post #39

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…

It's kind of scary how good it is. I haven't completely switched over, but I think a lot of that is just not wanting to admit that this is the new paradigm and the implications. The ability to not only find what you're looking for faster, but have it tailored to your specific context? It's hard to go back from that.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#136

Post by imchillyb »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rubbish. Reinventing existing software as a learning exercise has plenty of merit.

No it doesnt. Build new things or dont waste your time. Learning exercise lol.

I don't believe you understand the word iteration, why that word exists, or the benefits it provides to society in general.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#137

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

I don't really get a lot of joy out of building copies of things other people have done better than me before. Almost by definition, no list of cool toy projects is going to appeal to me for that reason. I might like the techniques or algorithms employed within them, but frankly if I'm after that kind of knowledge I just find Leetcode and traditional studying to be both higher value and more fun.

But I do like writing programs in some strange new, non-CS domain where very little software to address my very particular needs already exists. Most of the software I've written in the last few years has been of this kind, for the purposes of learning Finnish. It is amazing what a few shell scripts, fzf wrappers, and well-timed calls to an LLM can do for accelerating one's own learning process.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#138

Post by orthoxerox »

eliasdorneles wrote: post #93

I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours…

I think that if you interpret "X days" as "24*X hours" this list becomes much more realistic.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#139

Post by jabroni_salad »

dakiol wrote: post #39

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…

My most common use is to treat it like one of those recipe clippers that grabs a recipe out of an overly long blog post. Last weekend I punched '28 years after credits?' into Kagi and got back only what I wanted. Finally I can have a recipe clipper for any topic. I'm happy with it.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#140

Post by bluefirebrand »

rokkamokka wrote: post #114
polytely wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nice when it works, but sometimes I run into trouble where I don't know a right word to put in the prompt to get the answer I'm looking for. I've recently been playing around with Raku and had a really cryptic type signature error and Claude was of absolutely no help because it didn't know about the interaction of Signature literals and 'Slurpy' sigils in method parameters. Only when I learned about it and incl…

To be fair, this isn't a new problem - many times I've wanted to find something but not even known what to Google for.

I think the key difference here is that if you type into Google the wrong thing it will return poor results that make it fairly clear that you're not on the right track

LLMs will sometimes just invent something that basically gaslights you into thinking you're on the right track

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