The blissful Zen of a good side project

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 tags to style the resulting Anki notes.

This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.

I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.

All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.

But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.

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 nothing holding me back to play any longer. Same with watching TV shows or movies, I lose interest pretty quickly and feel an urge to create something.

I've always been very in tune with time, our lack of it, and felt like consumption is a waste of time.

That said I believe creativity is hormonal (that is only my personal belief, unproven). It comes and goes. Some days I can't stop creating, somedays I want netflix and chill. But that's 10 days cycle of sorts, 10 days on, 10 days off.

Depending on where you live, it's perfectly normal that due to current events, or a personal loss in your life, etc. you might not feel the creative bug tickling you. The creative hormone might be totally wiped by your current environment or predicament; tiredness, anger, stress, all play into it.

After all, since our early days in the caves, drawing on walls, Humans wouldn't do so unless they had safety, a full belly, and a warm fire. A place to call home. Creative time needs conditions to be filled.

[1] https://noben.org

I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.

This article really resonated with me.

I'm currenlty juggling a few side projects, one of which is a game I've been tinkering with for 3 years. It's a pretty simple simulation of riding your bike through a city at night. It's never been anywhere near close to anything I could actually release, but I finally at least pulled together a gameplay video I could show off to my familiy and friends. They were all pretty impressed, and all wanted to know when I'd actually release it.

But I doubt I ever will. To me, making the game is my game, and I've tried to frame my side project work to my gamer friends that way. Sometimes it's giving myself new techncial puzzles to figure out, other times it's just letting myself zone out and get creative with world building, snapping together building facades like legos to build whatever crazy city I can imagine. It's so much fun.

Another is a web project that's much less fun and creative, but the more I tinker with it the more it turns into something that may actually be useful to others. And it may actually turn into something I can release and promote, and maybe even earn a little beer money with. I'm currently working up the motivation and courage to do a Show HN on that one here soon.

It almost pains me to say it (for reasons I can't even articulate well) but I've found LLMs to be tremendously useful in pushing through on side project work. I've lost track of how many projects I've spun up over the years and abandoned as soon as I got to the tedious parts you need to tackle if you actually want a marketable product (admin interfaces, user accounts, endless boilerplate html, etc, etc). With a competent LLM I can just delegate all the tedious crap and stay focused on what's actually fun for me. It's great.

My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi network onto my router so that their cell customers would get more wifi coverage or something.

So I ordered a DOCSIS 3.1 modem off amazon, then went and rummaged around in my storage box for an old 2013 macbook air, installed ubuntu server on it, and finally learned how to setup a home router with DHCP, DNS, NAT, firewall, etc. Pihole was a lot of that, and I installed it as a docker container so that was a fun thing to learn to manage as well.

As an aside, ChatGPT made most of this possible. I have used *nix off and on for 25 years but haven't done serious system administration in at least 15 years. ChatGPT is definitely the crutch I needed to get off my ass and do more side projects.

My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code. It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).

- Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS development machines

- Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin UI (learning React/Vite)

- Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home network performance

- Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up my learning and get me unblocked when working on something unfamiliar The freedom to over engineer the shit out of something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to compromise a lot in my day job!

I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project way.

Blissful Zen is a great way to put it.

Story: My mother had 2 of her 3 dogs die on the same day. We buried them in the backyard as we have many little friends before them. This was the first time I dug the graves (my dad had always beared that -- but he passed away last year).

The grave soil was very clay rich. I had recently seen a video on how to reclaim natural clay. It was very rewarding to turn the natural clay into workable clay.

But the real challenge -- how to fire it? I saw guys using charcoal and bricks in their driveway but that can't get hot enough.

So the real Zen has been building an electric kiln from scratch. It is a simple-ish problem with a whole lot of simplish steps. Perfect to keep my mind occupied when it needs to be. I have also learned an amazing amount (about clay, pottery, kilns, Arduino/ESP32, thermocouples, resistance wire, refractory cement, insulation, electrical code, weird soldering techniques, and many more).

First fire will be tomorrow.

I love this.

My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?

Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I think: non-goal oriented growth.

I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting until I'm happy.

At work they rely on me to deliver in a reasonable time, and move on to the next task. Once something is working, it generally isn't changed too much, even to improve it (obviously if it's really important to improve it we make time for that, but that doesn't happen so often)

A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)

Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3 coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by Friday.

I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to familiarity.

I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the time, space and money to enjoy side projects again. Music, art, coding for the love of making something with no other reason than doing. I stopped thinking anything had to be anything - it just was. I could do for the sake of doing and it was liberating.

I've been very happy about this, it's been a blessing mentally. And very productive. I've enjoyed time and space, and I appreciate (again!) how lucky I am to be here.

My side projects have always mirrored work to a certain extent, kind of building what I wish I could really do at work.

Led to my current job, which I love. Hopefully this lasts.