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How do you use programming to express your creativity?

8 points by aryamaan ↗ HN
Do you use programming as a hobby after your job for creative appetite?

If yes, what are the things you do? I guess doing some hardware integrated project, making games or something related to your another hobby would be satisfying to do.

5 comments

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LeonB
One of the more fun/creative things I've done with code involved playing with Artificial Life. I put up a repository here: https://github.com/secretGeek/robots-versus-electric-sheep

This was a C# program (with a winforms frontend) that simulated several life forms interacting, and included a simple genetic algorithm. It was a lot of fun to write and tinker with.

"Two species, the blue robots and the gray sheep, wander around a paddock, competing to eat grass."

"They can breed only with their own species, and their offspring will inherit genes from both parents (with some mutation possible). Genes control the animal's inquisitiveness and other characteristics."

"It is strangely mesmerizing."

karmakaze
This is also my favorite type of program, where you coded all the parts but the result is unexpected and often surprising.

Another kind that's great is when you start building from opposite ends using whatever tech you pick or build and somehow when they meet things line up like you planned it all along.

karmakaze
Yes I have side projects either to use things I've learned in new ways or if my day job is becoming too routine to learn new things by making things I don't know how to make when I start.

I made two libraries[1,2] to the point where I need to use them for real life projects to shake out design/usability issues so I started a third project to write programs over HTTP. It's very contrived but challenging to print "Hello, world." using all the unnecessary contraptions.

[1] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql

[2] https://github.com/karmakaze/moja

simonblack
I make software emulators that mimic the hardware of early 'home computers' from back in the late 1970s to mid-1980s 8-bit pre-IBM PC era.

Possibly there might just be ten other people (or even fewer) in the world who would find my hobby useful.

It's a bit of a 'treasure hunt' to dig around to find old hardware manuals and then work out timing issues in the quest to emulate (say) a floppy-disk controller card from 1981.

latest-release
I have expressed by creativity by porting lots and still moving Kali linux tools to be used online by those who don't want to install kali. https://www.nmmapper.com/.

This is one of the greatest thins I have ever done. Because lots of tools and updating them to be used online. that involves maintaing a local copy