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Writing toy software is a joy

blog.jsbarretto.com

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Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#71

Post by gherkinnn »

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…

Same. By appending a ? to a query, Kagi returns a summary with references. Quick and easy.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#72

Post by coolThingsFirst »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #61
coolThingsFirst wrote: post #54

Waste of time, you wont impress anyone because there are no more software jobs left. Go to gym.

Who am I impressing at the gym? The weights have already been lifted

udk what you're missing out if you aren't in the gym twice a week.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#73

Post by hathawsh »

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.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#74

Post by neogodless »

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…

In my younger years, classic ASP + SQL was easy, and I had IIS + SQL Server set up on a server at my house. And I could write HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Deployment was... run update scripts, push ASP files via FTP.

Now I know there are newer ways to do things, and I'd love to set up CI/CD in my personal life, but every time I want to do a "toy project" I get hung up researching and thinking about my own personal software development life cycle.

What you choose for hosting and deployment for your toy projects?

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#75

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

This, and I use them for code review and rapidly generating prototypes that I heavily edit. Almost none of the LLM code survives usually. You could ask "Why dont you just write it yourself then?" but sometimes getting started with the skeleton of a working project is the most difficult part of it.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#76

Post by ryoshu »

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…

I learned about window functions in SQL using an LLM. I hadn't written SQL in over a decade and never ran across them. It explained how they work and the trade-offs. It was great!

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#77

Post by ryandrake »

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.

Strange example, because self-hosted email has been pretty much setup-and-forget for me. I’ve been hosting my own email for several domains on a $5 VPS for over a decade and it’s largely just hummed along, without needing babysitting. Very rarely, some ISP’s spamblocker gets a little too squirrelly and I have a brief deliverability issue, but those are rare and easy to resolve.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#78

Post by bitwize »

amunozo wrote: post #49
oconnor663 wrote: post #23

> 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. I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our…

I try to do exactly that. I phrase it as using LLM as teachers instead of interns.

I don't trust Dissociated Press on steroids as an intern; why TF do you think I'd trust it as a teacher?!

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#79

Post by thrtythreeforty »

simonw wrote: post #29
hu3 wrote: post #26

I've written a ton of throwaway toy applications for personal use. The tip I can share is: publish them on GitHub. You'll find out some of them are useful to a lot of people. I have multiple toy repos with 20+ stars and one with 200+ stars. Just put one screenshot and simple instructions to run on README.md, no need to write a manual. As simple as `npm install && npm run start` is enough instruction for most. The scr…

This is also a great way to stand out among other candidates in the resume-review stage of a hiring process. The number one question I have as a hiring manager is always "can this person actually write code". A GitHub profile with 2-3 projects with multiple commits to each one answers that question really well. I won't filter out people who don't have that - lots of great engineers have never published code before -…

The converse is actually a negative signal for me. If you list a GitHub profile on your resume, but that GitHub profile is a ghost town consisting exclusively of "test repo please ignore" and "freshman-year assignments I was required to fork from professor's repo," that tells me you don't have an above-average understanding of why you add something to your resume.

If you don't have an impressive GitHub profile, that's fine. To your point - the absence of it is not a penalty, and the presence of a good one is a very positive signal. But the presence of one that turns out to be a dud is a negative.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#80

Post by josefresco »

Vibe coding via Claude has re-ignited my passion for fun, side programming projects. After a few false starts, I figured out the tooling, processes and in just a few weeks I've built several apps and I'm having new ideas consistently:

-Family calendar/weather dashboard

-Bluesky reader that allows you to hide posts you've "seen"

-Work PM dashboard to make time tracking more gamified and dare I say... fun?

-Chrome Reddit extension that hides posts after viewing for X seconds

-A WordPress plugin to replace a plugin no longer maintained

What I love and had to get used to was looking/using these apps and being happy with them being only 90%. Initially I had Claude make many UI enhancements but I learned to just let most stuff go and focus on the function and building new stuff, not refinement.

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