A fellow I knew would build boats. Sailboats. I don’t know much about boats but I’d say that these were something like 25-30 foot boats. These were not dinghies.
He started from raw plans, build the hull ribs, layer on the fiberglass for the hull (he bought his resin in 50 gallon drums). Now, of course, he has to sand and finish the fiberglass.
Once he got to that point, he’d build a rig around the hull out of wood that allowed the hull to rotate in place around its axis with a hydraulic Jack. He did all of this alone.
Once upright, he’d have about 5000 lbs of lead delivered to be placed and secured in the keel. At this point he gets the top parts of the hull and deck in place so he can weatherproof the interior.
The interior is all hardwood. Mahogany and such. His two car garage was a dedicated woodworking and cabinetry shop. The boat was in his fenced backyard.
When it was all said and done, 4-5 years later, a truck and a crane would come, lift it out of the backyard, and take it to the local harbor, 30 miles away.
Then, he’d sell it, start over, and make another.
He didn’t sail.
I know he made at least 3 of them. I’m sure he profited on raw materials, not so sure on time, certainly not on time/value of money.
He was a software developer by trade. He wrote accounting systems.
Software is a winner takes all market mostly. The best software of its kind captures almost all of the users. While making physical items is not. There will be loads of other people better than you, but it doesn't really matter because those other people will be sold out / too expensive / not local.
So even if you are far less talented than most, you'll still find a good market at the right price.
This smacks to me of peak late stage capitalism. Not everything ought to be about profit and growth. The world already has too much unwanted, useless mass produced surplus/crap.
I like the message, but I feel like the article doesn't support the headline. Instead, it seems to be saying that you should make something that you are passionate about, and in return other people will want it. I have not found that to be true personally, although I would like for it to be true.
How will that happen? If I don't know anything about photography, and don't even like it much, certainly don't care about it, my photography app will be garbage.
Lot of more traditional software is something the coders don't need or even use, but they still provide real value think of something like inventory tracking in warehouse.
I think I am quite capable of developing understanding of a domain and building a tool to solve a problem in it even if I don’t personally care that much about it. There’s plenty of software out there solving problems it’s hard to imagine much of anyone feeling passionate about.
The product of a chef is the cooking, not the cooked product itself.
I often buy better ingredients than what's found at any restaurant, but I pay to sit at one because they're prepared, cooked and taste better when done by a professional.
Usually they are mediocre chefs. Actually I don't believe that a chef who doesn't like what he's cooking can make it right, and almost every awesome chef I know demand more from the quality of their dishes than their customers.
What about a more subtle take? Have you built things in the same way that you'd do it in a personal context? Had a feeling of "doing the right thing"? Put care into your work?
Lately i have been wondering about the weird projects that people make- the “I built a web application framework in brainfuck” or “I built a text based bitmap image editor” or “I loaded an LLM on a Speak’n’Spell” kind of projects (I made up all of those but see similar on HN every day).
I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend such enormous amounts of effort on such weird projects.
Because they find it fun? Interesting? I don’t understand how the opposite can be true. “Everything is a product” is a terrible mindset that too many people exhibit, especially those new to tech.
It's fun for them and they don't have the expectation that it will make money. And probably it doesn't, and that's fine, move on to the next thing. But once in a while, maybe it resonates with a greater need.
> I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend such enormous amounts of effort on such weird projects.
There's a great side-effect to these quirky projects. There's a Christian/Bible story called The Unmoved Rock. Essentially God tells some guy to go push against a huge boulder and he damn well near kills himself trying to move it over and over. After a while he complains and God points out that he never asked him to move the rock, just to push it, and now the guy is totally ripped and strong as an ox.
Essentially, however useless or niche these things are, you yourself grow with the making and crafting of them. You exercise and develop your creative thinking, and your problem solving skills.
> There's a Christian/Bible story called The Unmoved Rock.
Where did you learn this story?
I'm curious, because it's a cute little anecdote/illustration, but I'm fairly confident it's not in the Protestant Bible, having read that several times.
No idea where I learned that story. I'm an athiest so it was something that bubbled up out of the broader culture that stuck, rather than a result of specific study. A bit like the footprints-in-the-sand story I guess.
It's called "The Unmoved Rock", and available on-line.
I thought that this is something that wasn't done before (analysing google comments with ChatGPT) and that would be amazing. https://sentimentscanner.com
Simple as that and market will verify.
Also it is nice to develop 5-10 times quicker then in scrum/jira ticket driven development. I couldn't believe that in Saturday I can do more then 1-2 weeks in my job. I of course understand that this doesn't scale to team, but yeah it is nice to feel that you can write good code so fast as a rockstar developer
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
I think my recent project https://consciousness.social fits into the category of making something for the pure pleasure of it. But the medium of self-expression is the web, not the platform itself.
It’s like saying that the painting you are splashing color on is a medium of self-expression. I would rather say that painting itself is the medium.
>> Different expressions, conceived by various minds, undergo a form of natural selection, with the surviving expression being the one that resonates most with users. <<
I mean “survival” is a relative term. A painting may not survive, but the ideas encapsulated within that painting may come to inspire others to paint in a particular way. Does that mean that the initial painting survived? In some black and white definition, no. But look closely, and you may see some form of survival.
That’s why I wouldn’t necessarily see the most successful projects as those who attract the most attention. They may be obviously successful, but if something gives you pleasure to do and you “put your entire being” into it, it may be successful in more subtle ways that may not be obvious to you or anyone, really.
A friend of mine recently said that one of the books that I wrote changed the way he looks at the subjects the book was broaching. He asked me how many people I knew that were influenced by the ideas in the book. I replied that if it changed the view of even one person, then it’s enough for me, more than enough.
The most successful projects are those that change lives for the better…even for just one person, even in a non-obvious way. And you’re right, can’t see such things getting made without at least a bit of feeling.
I have that feeling trying to improve dev practices in a shop that had none. Years of effort and we’re barely at the point my previous place was at before I even started there.
Why care? The only reason I point stuff out at my current company is because I don't want to get on a performance improvement plan because of their dumb work forecasting solutions
If he can spend time at work doing things he likes to do then why not? He could have spent that time churning out features instead, but now he got to clean up a codebase, some people like doing that sort of thing.
Caring about your work and work environment can make time spent working a lot more fulfilling. Which isn't to say every company or every manager inspires such sentiment, but if you can find a way to care about your work, and/or find work that you care about, it's definitely more pleasant than just doing the minimum to collect pay.
Nothing is worse then when you care, and apparently all the code written/test/work done 3 months by team goes straight to the trash, no explanation.
Simply some exec in this large thought that it should go to trash, couldn't even give me a reason.
I quickly quit after that.
Believe me, it's far worse when everybody working on it thinks it should go in the trash, but everybody is still working on it because some exec in this large org thinks it still has promise year after year.
I've been on both sides of that, and while I appreciate execs that know how to give a project room to breath and find their footing, I also appreciate execs that know when to tear the bandaid off.
I can imagine caring about something like that if it was impending something important (say, it was about developing software that is part of court system/curing cancer/doing something that I consider personally important).
Or they are paid specifically for that, or they just spend they work hours on that.
Hopefully they are not spending unpaid overtime on that (unless they consciously volunteer to help with something important, not with widget marketing)
Ugh. I feel you. I left my last job in large part because I concluded that I had done as much as I ever would be able to in terms of improving things. Staying would just have led to increasing frustration. Better off leaving when I could feel good about the improvements that I made.
That is basically 90% of business line software that is built to support workflows and processes.
Employees don’t want the process, company wants process. Everyone building these is miserable and usually requirements are to actively make user lives miserable instead of easier.
Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky (although I've been very conscious to only work for SMEs which I think has a lot to do with it), but I always try really hard to figure out what the user/customer is actually trying to achieve, then what's the best way to get there using the resources available, regardless of any incumbent processes or strategy. To my mind this is the best of both worlds - I've got the satisfaction of making something great and the customer gets their life made easier.
As I've gone through my career I've focused less and less on some specific language or technology stack that is the flavour of the day, and I get my satisfaction from engineering a robust solution from whatever is the must appropriate technology in that specific case.
my takeaway from this piece was a bit diff than what seems to have been talked about so far.
clearing out externalities and understanding your own emotional response to a product- whether you’ve built it or not - is likely hard to learn, and is intuition driven.
and it is understanding this response that allows builders to create things that evoke a similar emotional response in others.
Personally, I’ve always been convinced that having this kind of ability is what enables people to make the difference between a very good and a truly great product.
I think it's ok, great even, the urge to make something that's so strong that you do act on it.
Having said a lot of people do software development for a living and they may depend on your project. So I think OSS authors do have the responsibility to word their motivation honestly, when they publish their projects.
I can't figure out what you're even trying to say.
What risk of being misled is even possible in oss?
There are junk oss put out by companies that want to claim they do oss for PR, but no one is misled by that. If the code is junk that doesn't do anything but say, shim a blob which contains the actual goods, everyone knows that, as there is no way to hide it.
There are lots of crap oss, or high quality oss who's design goals I don't like, but none of that is misleading.
There are oss where the original author changed their terms after some time, but then everyone just forks the last good version and proceeds from there.
There are companies that try to steal oss, but the original thing they try to sell is still there.
In no case is there any opportunity for misleading that I see, because regardless of anyone's thoughts or intentions, the actions are all in the open.
It's very simple, just put the project up and note: "I make a thing the way I like it". Do not paint a picture of something that you've made for public interests and actively encourage people to use it. Like when you make a fancy website and docs and benchmarks to compare to the n projects (that people depends on) before yours.
I personally would never use young OSSes, regardless of quality, but there are lots of gulible people in the software industry, not dissimilar to life in general.
> I think it's ok, great even, the urge to make something that's so strong that you do act on it.
This has been my year for this. There's been a backlog of projects that I had to "code out of my system". None of them commercially viable, but all that tugged at me.
That's pretty much my approach for side projects: If it's not something I need and enjoy, I don't do it.
Not sure about all that artsy "expression" talk. I also truly enjoy building products someone else needs and enjoys. When the guy who pays you is the guy who wants it, I find that similarly motivating, even if I myself will never have a need for what I built there.
Now, I've also been in a different situation: Being hired by someone to work on products for other people based on research and data. I don't care, the guy who pays me doesn't care, it's all about economics: Extract the maximum amount of money from users with the least effort. That I find demotivating. I don't think it's because I can't "express myself". It's just working on something that's not primarily trying to be useful or enjoyable, it's mainly trying to get bought/used.
I find the best products are those that are built with humans in mind. Who will be using it, how will they use it, why will they like it. Products/features that are following pure research/data tend to be missing a human element and rarely feel excellent regardless of their market performance.
Good advice, and I’d take this a step further and say sometimes the thing you’re making isn’t wanted by anyone now, but will be by people in the future.
My go-to example here is Nietzsche, who spent most of his life writing in obscurity. He actually had to pay to have some of his books published. Only after he became mentally incapacitated and died did his fame grow, and now he’s generally considered one of the three most important thinkers of the era, along with Marx and Freud.
Obviously making a little hobby web app is not the same as writing books about the future of Western civilization, but I think the lesson is: work on what you really think is important, not on what you’ve convinced yourself is important by listening to others.
One of few things that I hold pretty tight is that I don't put any expectations out of others approvals when it comes to self actualisation. if people find it repulsive, that's fine. when they find it ok, that's also fine.
This article resonated with me a lot and had me reflecting on my journey writing komorebi.
I started writing komorebi because I had recently migrated to Windows and was really struggling without a tiling window manager. I didn't know anything about Win32 APIs when I started, or much about Rust either, actually.
Fast forward to today, and komorebi is sitting at 35k downloads, supported by a huge Discord server, a vibrant community, and hundreds of people watching me develop it on YouTube.
I created some incredibly important and impactful systems at $dayjob some years before I started komorebi. It was at a real low point in my life where I was struggling with depression, and I still _feel_ that when I look at the codebases and interact with those systems today. I wonder if others do, too. In some ways, I'm glad that those codebases and those systems are not public for others to see for that reason.
I am however, very glad that komorebi is out for the public to see, because I built it in a place of joy, hope and serenity, and I believe that those feelings are there to be seen in both the codebase and the product.
I really like your interpretation of psychology on resultant codebases. Personally, I have very mild bipolar-like tendencies, and I find that I don't really get much done except in my "manic" phases. If I'm feeling more charitable to myself I call it an explore/exploit loop. I consider it one of life's many seasons, and don't mind the oscillations too much.
However, while I've read serene code, my own code often reads as "manic" in my own estimation.
I haven't found the state of mind where I would even attempt serene code: when I'm at peace, writing code seems like a waste of time when there's trees and bubbling waters outside, and good friends and family to share gentle laughs with. I genuinely enjoy coding, but I would like it if I could find that serene mental space that also afforded productivity.
Oh that's interesting! I've been experiencing a similar thing recently. If I'm satisfied with life, there's not much drive to code, it feels like it's just going to disturb my peace.
But when I'm feeling like stuff just isn't good enough and something must be done, "doing something" means writing code, either until I'm satisfied or until I'm tired. Sometimes the codebases in my day job don't satisfy, so I contribute to open source instead, as that feels more impactful and permanent.
I wonder how many projects came into existence just because someone was unhappy with the way things were and the only thing they could do that felt impactful was programming.
I think what you have experienced is very real. Code (and most forms of expression) are a way to externalize your state of mind.
I've seen it with my own emotional states but also with coworkers when they are going trough a rough time.
This is also why it is difficult to understand others ppl code. And it gets easier as you build a relation/get to know them better. The better you know someone, the easier and faster you can understand their code.
I feel like that is why coding standards, code reviews etc make a codebase more maintainable. You strip the code emotions away or at least reset it to a common level across the team.
One reason why I went 100% Linux was because I couldn't find a window manager equivalent elsewhere that was anywhere close to i3. And yours, to me, looks competitive with i3.
The window manager has been the one killer feature that was just not available at the same level on MacOS or Windows. It's nice to see that changing.
Yea like.... I've been "following my heart" or whatever for over 15 years... sure, I made some cool shit, and some people really like it. But it doesn't pay. I need money.
To invent something objectively novel and significant. To spend a fair chunk of your life on that quest. And to get zero monetary compensation for it. To be ignored that way. It's educational.
I started on a comment but ended up writing a post on my own. In my opinion, if your goal is to achieve mainstream success, the method may not be advisable unless you have ample resources for experimentation.
>I'm a generalist too, or as someone else put it - a serial specialist. You could just stagnate until you retire. That's basically what I'm doing, but for slightly different reasons.
>Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).
>Going for knowledge just because it sounds cool isn't going to be a motivator strong enough for success. Find stuff you're interested in and dive into those. The way to become a well-rounded person is to become obsessive in many things (possibly not simultaneously) that are unusual in some way. In fact, learning anything will feel like specialization, and in fact being a serial specialist is probably the most viable way to become a "Renaissance man" today.
>Note that the first thing that came to my mind when I read your post was: "To be a true Renaissance man, you need to have been dead for 400 years". I won't write it here :)
The Church of the Subgenius has a similar concept called the "Short Duration Personal Savior" (or ShorDurPerSav, the proper Tibetian term):
>Wow; just wow. Thank you for filling that gaping hole in my education with Dick Tuck [1] [2]! My new short duration personal savior [2].
Speaking of favorite ShorDurPerSavs: John Gage [4], who was Sun Microsystem's "Science Officer" and turned the Sun logo 45 degrees on its corner, had the honor of serving his country on Nixon's enemies list [5] -- a distinguished achievement that L. Ron Hubbard falsely claimed about himself!
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer." --Dick Tuck on the difference between himself and Nixon's Watergate operatives.
"The people have spoken, the bastards." --Dick Tuck's concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election.
> people can’t make something they don’t like and hope others will like it
There are implicit assumptions here about what "making" and "liking" means in this context. The vast majority of stuff that gets done and used is rote (think preparing daily food) and doesn't involve likeability in critical ways. It simply requires usability and maybe the absence of dislikeability.
Now if you want to invent a new dish, the calculus changes and becomes a mix of hopeless inertia (people don't easily change tastes) and stochasticity (except when they do).
What is more important imho is that whatever you do is a concrete, articulated something. That is what is usually expressed by the "what problem does it solve?" question. While I don't think that casting everything as a "problem" covers all bases, the idea is that people like having their problems solved. An ugly solution is still a solution.
But even those are partial considerations. People also just like stuff that other people like (fashion) with little intrinsic justification besides being part of a group.
> you create something not because “I think they might need this,” but because “I find this so fucking interesting.”
This is a fantastic insight.
I also find that it's what often gets overlooked in open source projects that start as somebody doing something on the side as a hobby. Don't create and publish open source projects to please others. Build something that you like to have yourself. When publishing it, do it as an invitation to others to try it out and perhaps give you feedback (crowdsourcing bug triage and extension ideas), not to make others happy. The trap is that others will start feeling entitled, start demanding things, and if you give in, you violate the insight I quoted above. And if you start losing interest, don't cling on to the project, but be open to some other maintainer adopting it. Don't waste your time maintaining something you are not internally interested in.
The same is true also for users of open source projects. Be aware that whoever did this and published it for you to use did so originally because they like it and want to use it themselves. You can't demand things from somebody like that. If you do, you actually make it more likely that they lose interest.
I feel this resonates with mindfulness lifestyle: give your full attention to the present moment and the quality of your activity (and product) will show.
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[ 1810 ms ] story [ 4379 ms ] threadHaving hobbies is fine, but it's not a business model.
He started from raw plans, build the hull ribs, layer on the fiberglass for the hull (he bought his resin in 50 gallon drums). Now, of course, he has to sand and finish the fiberglass.
Once he got to that point, he’d build a rig around the hull out of wood that allowed the hull to rotate in place around its axis with a hydraulic Jack. He did all of this alone.
Once upright, he’d have about 5000 lbs of lead delivered to be placed and secured in the keel. At this point he gets the top parts of the hull and deck in place so he can weatherproof the interior.
The interior is all hardwood. Mahogany and such. His two car garage was a dedicated woodworking and cabinetry shop. The boat was in his fenced backyard.
When it was all said and done, 4-5 years later, a truck and a crane would come, lift it out of the backyard, and take it to the local harbor, 30 miles away.
Then, he’d sell it, start over, and make another.
He didn’t sail.
I know he made at least 3 of them. I’m sure he profited on raw materials, not so sure on time, certainly not on time/value of money.
He was a software developer by trade. He wrote accounting systems.
So even if you are far less talented than most, you'll still find a good market at the right price.
It's impossible to come up with a business model that does not depend on chance.
Precisely as so many apps are garbage.
I often buy better ingredients than what's found at any restaurant, but I pay to sit at one because they're prepared, cooked and taste better when done by a professional.
I tell this to my mom often
I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend such enormous amounts of effort on such weird projects.
Why are you judging people doing something they enjoy? You don’t have any hobbies that aren’t all economically profitable?
Not quite as good as Rollercoaster Tycoon in Assembly.. but close.
There's a great side-effect to these quirky projects. There's a Christian/Bible story called The Unmoved Rock. Essentially God tells some guy to go push against a huge boulder and he damn well near kills himself trying to move it over and over. After a while he complains and God points out that he never asked him to move the rock, just to push it, and now the guy is totally ripped and strong as an ox.
Essentially, however useless or niche these things are, you yourself grow with the making and crafting of them. You exercise and develop your creative thinking, and your problem solving skills.
Where did you learn this story?
I'm curious, because it's a cute little anecdote/illustration, but I'm fairly confident it's not in the Protestant Bible, having read that several times.
It's called "The Unmoved Rock", and available on-line.
2) they do this to explore/test technology XYZ
3) they are so talented and experienced that it does not require enormous amount of time
4) for promotion, bragging rights
5) some combination of above
Also it is nice to develop 5-10 times quicker then in scrum/jira ticket driven development. I couldn't believe that in Saturday I can do more then 1-2 weeks in my job. I of course understand that this doesn't scale to team, but yeah it is nice to feel that you can write good code so fast as a rockstar developer
>You can’t be devoid of emotion and expect users to experience emotion after using it.
IOW, art.
It’s like saying that the painting you are splashing color on is a medium of self-expression. I would rather say that painting itself is the medium.
>> Different expressions, conceived by various minds, undergo a form of natural selection, with the surviving expression being the one that resonates most with users. <<
I mean “survival” is a relative term. A painting may not survive, but the ideas encapsulated within that painting may come to inspire others to paint in a particular way. Does that mean that the initial painting survived? In some black and white definition, no. But look closely, and you may see some form of survival.
That’s why I wouldn’t necessarily see the most successful projects as those who attract the most attention. They may be obviously successful, but if something gives you pleasure to do and you “put your entire being” into it, it may be successful in more subtle ways that may not be obvious to you or anyone, really.
A friend of mine recently said that one of the books that I wrote changed the way he looks at the subjects the book was broaching. He asked me how many people I knew that were influenced by the ideas in the book. I replied that if it changed the view of even one person, then it’s enough for me, more than enough.
The most successful projects are those that change lives for the better…even for just one person, even in a non-obvious way. And you’re right, can’t see such things getting made without at least a bit of feeling.
On a less happy note, there are definitely jobs I've had where I felt like nobody wanted what I was making and its kind of miserable
I've been on both sides of that, and while I appreciate execs that know how to give a project room to breath and find their footing, I also appreciate execs that know when to tear the bandaid off.
Or they are paid specifically for that, or they just spend they work hours on that.
Hopefully they are not spending unpaid overtime on that (unless they consciously volunteer to help with something important, not with widget marketing)
Dear god, no. I’m paid for it.
It still feels like nobody (except my boss) wants what I’m selling.
Which isn’t exactly true either, but people certainly do not embrace change.
Employees don’t want the process, company wants process. Everyone building these is miserable and usually requirements are to actively make user lives miserable instead of easier.
As I've gone through my career I've focused less and less on some specific language or technology stack that is the flavour of the day, and I get my satisfaction from engineering a robust solution from whatever is the must appropriate technology in that specific case.
Besides, our tastes aren't all that unique.
clearing out externalities and understanding your own emotional response to a product- whether you’ve built it or not - is likely hard to learn, and is intuition driven.
and it is understanding this response that allows builders to create things that evoke a similar emotional response in others.
Having said a lot of people do software development for a living and they may depend on your project. So I think OSS authors do have the responsibility to word their motivation honestly, when they publish their projects.
But open sourcing some code does not equal some kind of agreement to support people using it.
What risk of being misled is even possible in oss?
There are junk oss put out by companies that want to claim they do oss for PR, but no one is misled by that. If the code is junk that doesn't do anything but say, shim a blob which contains the actual goods, everyone knows that, as there is no way to hide it.
There are lots of crap oss, or high quality oss who's design goals I don't like, but none of that is misleading.
There are oss where the original author changed their terms after some time, but then everyone just forks the last good version and proceeds from there.
There are companies that try to steal oss, but the original thing they try to sell is still there.
In no case is there any opportunity for misleading that I see, because regardless of anyone's thoughts or intentions, the actions are all in the open.
I personally would never use young OSSes, regardless of quality, but there are lots of gulible people in the software industry, not dissimilar to life in general.
- https://coderev.app : code review as interview (OSS)
- https://turas.app : travel planning and story telling for well organized travellers (origin story: https://youtu.be/_SuT9TpJc2c)
- https://youtu.be/ObwLR6Wxr6o : "ProtocolGPT" - ChatGPT for clinical trial sites (latest one I'm building).
All three built between May and now. Built another project for fintech with another team.
Sometimes I think I'm crazy. Turned down a few really good startups this year working on stuff I wanted to.
Not sure about all that artsy "expression" talk. I also truly enjoy building products someone else needs and enjoys. When the guy who pays you is the guy who wants it, I find that similarly motivating, even if I myself will never have a need for what I built there.
Now, I've also been in a different situation: Being hired by someone to work on products for other people based on research and data. I don't care, the guy who pays me doesn't care, it's all about economics: Extract the maximum amount of money from users with the least effort. That I find demotivating. I don't think it's because I can't "express myself". It's just working on something that's not primarily trying to be useful or enjoyable, it's mainly trying to get bought/used.
My go-to example here is Nietzsche, who spent most of his life writing in obscurity. He actually had to pay to have some of his books published. Only after he became mentally incapacitated and died did his fame grow, and now he’s generally considered one of the three most important thinkers of the era, along with Marx and Freud.
Obviously making a little hobby web app is not the same as writing books about the future of Western civilization, but I think the lesson is: work on what you really think is important, not on what you’ve convinced yourself is important by listening to others.
I started writing komorebi because I had recently migrated to Windows and was really struggling without a tiling window manager. I didn't know anything about Win32 APIs when I started, or much about Rust either, actually.
Fast forward to today, and komorebi is sitting at 35k downloads, supported by a huge Discord server, a vibrant community, and hundreds of people watching me develop it on YouTube.
I created some incredibly important and impactful systems at $dayjob some years before I started komorebi. It was at a real low point in my life where I was struggling with depression, and I still _feel_ that when I look at the codebases and interact with those systems today. I wonder if others do, too. In some ways, I'm glad that those codebases and those systems are not public for others to see for that reason.
I am however, very glad that komorebi is out for the public to see, because I built it in a place of joy, hope and serenity, and I believe that those feelings are there to be seen in both the codebase and the product.
However, while I've read serene code, my own code often reads as "manic" in my own estimation.
I haven't found the state of mind where I would even attempt serene code: when I'm at peace, writing code seems like a waste of time when there's trees and bubbling waters outside, and good friends and family to share gentle laughs with. I genuinely enjoy coding, but I would like it if I could find that serene mental space that also afforded productivity.
I wonder how many projects came into existence just because someone was unhappy with the way things were and the only thing they could do that felt impactful was programming.
I've seen it with my own emotional states but also with coworkers when they are going trough a rough time.
This is also why it is difficult to understand others ppl code. And it gets easier as you build a relation/get to know them better. The better you know someone, the easier and faster you can understand their code.
I feel like that is why coding standards, code reviews etc make a codebase more maintainable. You strip the code emotions away or at least reset it to a common level across the team.
One reason why I went 100% Linux was because I couldn't find a window manager equivalent elsewhere that was anywhere close to i3. And yours, to me, looks competitive with i3.
The window manager has been the one killer feature that was just not available at the same level on MacOS or Windows. It's nice to see that changing.
Lots of companies make things they want, but people should not want. And they let people take up the slack.
But I'm thinking of things like email - that reads people's mail. and on and on...
Not surprising users don't want to be the users either!
Some of us have a primal urge to create something new, something we personally appreciate, regardless of whether that intersects with our job.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/double-edged-sword-creative-i...
Source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034857
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518739
DonHopkins on March 8, 2020 | prev | next [–]
I've seen people on hn describe themselves as "serial specialists". (However, nobody admits to being a "parallel generalist".)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22337342
>I'm a generalist too, or as someone else put it - a serial specialist. You could just stagnate until you retire. That's basically what I'm doing, but for slightly different reasons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22335697
>Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317080
>Going for knowledge just because it sounds cool isn't going to be a motivator strong enough for success. Find stuff you're interested in and dive into those. The way to become a well-rounded person is to become obsessive in many things (possibly not simultaneously) that are unusual in some way. In fact, learning anything will feel like specialization, and in fact being a serial specialist is probably the most viable way to become a "Renaissance man" today.
>Note that the first thing that came to my mind when I read your post was: "To be a true Renaissance man, you need to have been dead for 400 years". I won't write it here :)
The Church of the Subgenius has a similar concept called the "Short Duration Personal Savior" (or ShorDurPerSav, the proper Tibetian term):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045688
>Wow; just wow. Thank you for filling that gaping hole in my education with Dick Tuck [1] [2]! My new short duration personal savior [2].
Speaking of favorite ShorDurPerSavs: John Gage [4], who was Sun Microsystem's "Science Officer" and turned the Sun logo 45 degrees on its corner, had the honor of serving his country on Nixon's enemies list [5] -- a distinguished achievement that L. Ron Hubbard falsely claimed about himself!
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer." --Dick Tuck on the difference between himself and Nixon's Watergate operatives.
"The people have spoken, the bastards." --Dick Tuck's concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tuck
[2] http://hoaxes.org/tuck.html
[3] http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/goods/shordurpersavs/X0012_...
[4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/suns-gage-looks-ahead/
[5] bobse ↗ Only if you paid for it with your own money. [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) nologic01 ↗ > people can’t make something they don’t like and hope others will like it 6stringmerc ↗ aka 99% of music produced in a given day worldwide. greffer ↗ > you create something not because “I think they might need this,” but because “I find this so fucking interesting.” rodrigosetti ↗ I feel this resonates with mindfulness lifestyle: give your full attention to the present moment and the quality of your activity (and product) will show. sebastianconcpt ↗ ...if you have other sources that can defend you from the bills.
There are implicit assumptions here about what "making" and "liking" means in this context. The vast majority of stuff that gets done and used is rote (think preparing daily food) and doesn't involve likeability in critical ways. It simply requires usability and maybe the absence of dislikeability.
Now if you want to invent a new dish, the calculus changes and becomes a mix of hopeless inertia (people don't easily change tastes) and stochasticity (except when they do).
What is more important imho is that whatever you do is a concrete, articulated something. That is what is usually expressed by the "what problem does it solve?" question. While I don't think that casting everything as a "problem" covers all bases, the idea is that people like having their problems solved. An ugly solution is still a solution.
But even those are partial considerations. People also just like stuff that other people like (fashion) with little intrinsic justification besides being part of a group.
This is a fantastic insight.
I also find that it's what often gets overlooked in open source projects that start as somebody doing something on the side as a hobby. Don't create and publish open source projects to please others. Build something that you like to have yourself. When publishing it, do it as an invitation to others to try it out and perhaps give you feedback (crowdsourcing bug triage and extension ideas), not to make others happy. The trap is that others will start feeling entitled, start demanding things, and if you give in, you violate the insight I quoted above. And if you start losing interest, don't cling on to the project, but be open to some other maintainer adopting it. Don't waste your time maintaining something you are not internally interested in.
The same is true also for users of open source projects. Be aware that whoever did this and published it for you to use did so originally because they like it and want to use it themselves. You can't demand things from somebody like that. If you do, you actually make it more likely that they lose interest.
The obvious needs to be stated.
That said, yes! Learning by genuine curiosity is what can bring to express the best in ourselves.