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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

#81

Post by sandbach »

cafeinux wrote: post #20

I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course. Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki. One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML…

I like to do this!

Here's one I made for British Sign Language by scraping signbsl.com: https://github.com/sandbach/bsl-gcse

And an Arabic one by scraping Reverso: https://github.com/sandbach/arabic_vocabulary

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#82

Post by leoedin »

jlcases wrote: post #79

Documentation quality has been the determining factor in the evolution of my side projects. I've developed a structured documentation system that has completely transformed my workflow with AI assistants.

Can you share more about this?

I think that's often the thing that kills my side projects. I'll make reasonable progress, lose interest for a bit, and then when I come back to it all the working memory is gone and so I spend a few hours just getting up to speed again. Better ongoing documentation to allow quicker self-onboarding is what I need!

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#83

Post by indemnity »

esperent wrote: post #59
indemnity wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Final assembly was recent, but it took months of planning and research, mainly around being sure the components would fit in the tight tolerances of the FormD 2.1 9.95L case. I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up around the GPU…

Thank you for sharing, I'm gonna save this comment and come back to it. I'm in Vietnam and chose this case partly because it seems resellers do have it in stock here. It's all the other stuff - custom risers and cables - I'm worried about. I'm gonna target a 4080/5080 - stuck with Nvidia because CUDA - which gives me a lot more wiggle room with the power supply. I've built plenty of PCs, including a few SFF PCs witho…

If you go for the 4080 or 5080, you will have a lot more options for sure. If you can find one, I would try get a 2/2.5 slot wide card, gives you so much more flexibility.

Bookmark this Excel, saves you a lot of time looking up specs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AddRvGWJ_f4B6UC7_Ift...

You want a GPU no longer than 325mm (though exactly 325mm may be pushing it).

For the 4090 it was basically Founder's Edition or my card. FE was impossible to source (I am not in the USA), and I had to get the MSI card specially ordered in, the most common card was the ASUS ROG monster which at 357mm would never fit.

At 322mm, the MSI card barely fits (after deshrouding), there is like 2-3mm to spare length-wise. And you have to build in 3 slot mode if you want any clearance from the PSU (mount PSU on standoffs).

Before deshrouding, the GPU plastic covers mean you can't also plug in the USB-C I/O port.

Oh yeah, forgot about the riser cable.

The one that comes with the FormD case is serviceable, but depending on the motherboard. I believe it has issues with Gigabyte B760 and B650 motherboards.

I also have the LinkUp 19mm PCIe 5.0 V2 riser cable (https://linkup.one/linkup-ava5-pcie-5-0-riser-cable-future-p...), but it can only be used in air-cooled builds - it has a red tab at the top which blocks the radiator if you want to use it with watercooled/AIOs. See this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/1f5ij02/question_re_.... Some brave souls have hacked off the tab with a knife/scissors but you have to be careful not to cut the wires along with it :)

So I had to go back to the stock cable for the AIO flavor build, which has other issues (you have to fold it/squash it a bit at the bottom where it bends around below the motherboard, so that pressure on it doesn't cause it to make it pop out of the motherboard connector). Before you put on the bottom cover with the feet on it, the riser will touch the surface of whatever you are building on, and given enough time can cause the motherboard connector to loosen or pop out.

Had hours of debugging fun trying to figure out why it was starting to lock up while gaming, turned out to be the riser having wiggled loose from the motherboard.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#84

Post by grumpy-de-sre »

keyle wrote: post #74
djmips wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are your in the opposite camp of an article encouraging side projects when you say you have many side projects?

The author wrote about long periods of time when he wasn't encouraged to make anything creative, and just consume.

You're definitely not alone.

In my case it's somewhat of a learned behavior, a lot of my favorite video games make me violently motion sick so over time I just stopped playing them.

Most TV is pretty boring IMO. There's always exceptions but it's not something I find myself regularly being drawn to.

I'm always tinkering on something (a longtime favorite is gardening), and I'm pretty sure I'll always be tinkering until the day I die. Some of us are just wired differently.

Can be a little difficult to connect with the mainstream folks though. I pretty much live in a different world.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#85

Post by Xmd5a »

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.

Whenever I feel like I'm losing time, I go watch this and I feel much better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZbfNtDCHdM

    @sappho3000
    11 months ago
    stop glamorizing "the grind" and start glamorizing whatever this is

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#86

Post by paulbjensen »

This post hit the nail on the head for me.

Having just finished up a 4-year contracting gig this week, I decided to learn Svelte and recreate a silly little music PoC I made about 15 years ago:

Demo: http://lets-make-sweet-music.com Github: http://github.com/paulbjensen/lets-make-sweet-music

I started making it about 2 days ago - One of my former colleagues even managed to play the Jurassic Park theme song on it for a bit.

What I loved about working on that side project I think is a couple of things:

1 - I could have an idea, implement it, and push it up right away.

This is a breathe of fresh air compared to the coding process at my last gig. The client had a well-structured process of submitting pull requests which required a code review approval before being merged into the codebase.

That process meant that you essentially spent your day picking up tickets and moving them along, and because people wouldn't necessarily be immediately available to perform the code review, the PR could stay open for quite some time.

That delayed feedback loop and hoop-jumping process adds stop-starts into the coding flow state. You can never get into it the same way you can working on a side project.

2 - The tech stack choices are yours to make and quick to do

The tech stack choices used with the client were made by the tech steering committee and your job was essentially to implement the features required by your product team within the parameters of those tech stack choices. They do that to ensure that there is a consistent use of technologies within the company, to the extent that you can quickly swap say frontend engineers from one team to another whenever needed and they can be productive.

On one hand that is great, but on the other hand you don't have the freedom to try new technologies, or even introduce tooling that you feel is better suited for the requirement.

I even had to justify trying to use Sentry rather than ElasticSearch's Kibana for error logging, even though the client was using both tools within the business.

When you are working on the side project, you can make choices and decisions far quicker and easier - the feedback loop is just much quicker and progress happens faster.

3 - The scope of your input into the side project is far greater

When I worked with the client, I was effectively working as a frontend engineer, because they had a gap in a product team to fill.

However, my skills and experience in my career extended to being a full-stack developer who also liked to work on design work in Sketch and even knew how to deploy to VPS, not just work with a PaaS.

When you don't get to use those skills daily in your client work, they will wither, and you can end up becoming pigeon-holed and institutionalised into a narrow way-of-working, which is a danger to being able to apply the full extent of your capabilities.

So the side projects end up serving as a way to exercise those underused skills. Especially if you relish having creative freedom, which reminds me of something that Paul Graham said about developers - they don't do it necessarily for the money - they do it to have creative freedom.

I haven't found the link to the video, but he touches on it a bit in this post: https://www.paulgraham.com/really.html

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#87

Post by joseferben »

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.

for me i figured out it’s about the body. it’s ok to be lifted up from the body into the thinking mind but i “owe” my body to spend some time there as well.

sometimes all it takes is sitting 20min in the morning just observing sensations in my body, and saying good morning to various organs haha. sounds silly but creates a solid foundation for my day.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#88

Post by chenshuiluke »

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 wish I could be more like you in this regard. Perhaps you're right about the "creative hormone" thing.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#89

Post by intelVISA »

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…

We have finite time, self-actualization through creation is very human. Too much passive consumption is sleepwalking through life.

However, creators often forget that mental exercise is like physical, you don't sprint 24/7 you have to pace intensity whether it's running or writing Clojure.

Re: The blissful Zen of a good side project

#90

Post by barbs »

nradov wrote: post #65

It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good". My last significant side project was the opposite of "blissful". In order to preserve and migrate some important personal data I had to reverse engineer an obsolete, undocumented file format. Then I had to use a confusing and badly documented commercial library to convert the data into a modern file format. I had to figure everything out through trial and error…

Is it weird that I actually think that sounds enjoyable?
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