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Writing toy software is a joy

blog.jsbarretto.com

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Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#231

Post by xmprt »

Swizec wrote: post #3

Toy Software is a lot like working on your bike/car/boat/whatever. Working on your bike is fun. Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. I miss writing toy software. It’s fun. But inevitably I want to use said software and that’s where the trouble starts. You find all the bugs and none of the time to fix them.

Perfect example for me is that I use beancount for tracking my finances. It broke one day because I tried upgrading some dependencies from v2 to v3. I tried messing around with the imports and some function names but it didn't help and after wasting 30m I decided to give up on the upgrade.

2 weeks later when I wasn't busy trying to get it to work, I gave it another shot. This time went so much more smoothly and now everything works (fingers crossed since I haven't actually tried out ALL the functionality).

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#232

Post by jwr »

snackbroken wrote: post #132
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…

Try perplexity — I found it to be very good at digging up information. It became a nearly complete replacement for web searches at this point.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#233

Post by williamcotton »

patrickmay wrote: post #208
lillecarl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this. But the killer usecase for me is writing all boilerplate and implementing some half-working stuff keeps my attention on the issue which makes me able to complete more complex things. A recent example is when I implemented a (Kubernetes) CSI driver that makes /nix available in a container so you can run an empty image and skip a lot of infra to manage. I talked to it a bit and eventually it wrote a Nix deri…

I hear a lot of people talk about LLMs writing the "boilerplate" and wonder why they haven't abstracted that away in the first place. Maybe my brain has been permanently altered by hacking Lisp.

Boilerplate can be a slog to write but a breeze to read.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#234

Post by zffr »

eikenberry wrote: post #131
zffr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think the bottleneck was in your search?

Was it finding openings, getting interviews, or passing those interviews?

In my niche I’m finding that there are very few opening in the city I live in, but that getting interviews might not be too hard. Not sure how easy it would be to pass those interviews.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#236

Post by cortesoft »

snackbroken wrote: post #132
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…

I was trying to set up a solr cluster on kubernetes the other day, and was googling how to create a new collection.

Google AI helpfully showed me this awesome CRD that created exactly what I wanted... sadly, there is no such CRD in reality

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#237

Post by spaqin »

hathawsh wrote: post #73
dwh452 wrote: post #38

What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would be making deployment extremely simple, reliable, and safe.

How about a very reliable device with an interface that even a child can understand, deployment process that consists of only one action, and no upkeep costs? Like, for example, a notebook... Not everything has to be computerized or software.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#238

Post by krgyxe »

whartung wrote: post #40
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just add that gen AI can actually be a fantastic aid when you're building some toy projects just for yourself. I am primarily a backend engineer, though I am capable on the front end, just not particularly fast. I am especially slow at the voodoo that is CSS. In the past, I would have been turned off from doing some end-to-end personal projects because I know I would have been bogged down just battling CSS fo…

It's a balance I find. On the one hand, the machines can spin up these bridges over unfamiliar code chasms. But on the other hand, you (at least I) have no investment in the code. No familiarity with it. No "skin in the game" when I can tell the AI to just redo it. One way around that is by using the "Chat bots as search engine", and then, rather than cut and pasting stuff into your project, type it in by hand. Even…

Hard agree on this.

I've come to the point of using current AI tools as "search on steroids". For coding tasks, I now ask questions using more generic language, looking for references, and when the AI comes back with specific examples, I try to refine the question in terms of the example that the AI has given me. "Kinda like that, but inside of Book, I actually want to do X with the Author"

This makes it so that I have to manually translate code that the AI is showing me to my specific case, typing it out myself in my code's context. This has helped immensely with developing my familiarity with a couple of new (to me) frameworks, and with slowly adding to my overall understanding of what I'm /actually/ building.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#239

Post by npodbielski »

pjc50 wrote: post #15
Swizec wrote: post #3

Toy Software is a lot like working on your bike/car/boat/whatever. Working on your bike is fun. Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. I miss writing toy software. It’s fun. But inevitably I want to use said software and that’s where the trouble starts. You find all the bugs and none of the time to fix them.

I used to self-host my email. I don't any more, for exactly this reason. And of course this applies to every other "just do it yourself!" enthusiast appeal. I actually want to delegate it to someone who does it full time.

What kind of issues you have with it? I am running my own email server for.about 10 years and very rarely have to look at it.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#240

Post by astee »

snackbroken wrote: post #132
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…

It's interesting because I use them every day all day for this now.

You have to "gut check" the answers and know when to go deeper.

A lot of answers are low stakes, and it's OK to be a little wrong if it helps go in the right direction.

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