Agree with focusing on doing it because you enjoy it, something gets lost when we try and impress others; I'm sure we can all remember being a child and doing things purely because we enjoyed it.
However, I disagree with the personal style part of things, or trying to make things look good. These things don't have to be about impressing an audience. It can be just as much about enjoying the process.
The way I read “personal style” was, don’t make it your whole personality.
And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism.
For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.
But the second you want to make things for anyone else is when UI/UX matters.
Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.
People say this but I never saw it matter like you say. I know many ux/ui people in my network who I ask for feedback and help; I have never seen any difference in uptake from the vanilla theme version I did myself through to months of tweaking these guys did. Sure it looks tons nicer but it doesn’t reflect at all in (measured) user satisfaction, signups or usage. The default themes these days (shadcn etc) don’t make any of the mistakes you mentioned and users that are not obsessed with tech don’t really care ‘it looks like everything else’. Maybe it’s because I never do b2c and only b2b, but I never saw the difference, not in the last 30 years anyway. Even when these design systems and widgets etc didn’t exist, people didn’t care because there was nothing better; now there is ‘more than good enough by default’.
Would it change anything if Hacker News was redesigned to look exactly like Reddit's UI? Because a lot of people would not want that. Behind the scenes, there are a lot of similarities between the two sites - but doesn't the fact that they look so different actually make them different?
If you're saying design doesn't matter at all then changing the look of Hacker News to be like Reddit should have no effect on user satisfaction, signups, or usage.
I sense a bias toward minimalism (that I share) but that's still intentional design.
Yes, you have a good point. And you are right about minimalism; I think though this is different in the way you state this example; reddit is now made to be annoying to make money with ads and data collection: I believe no one likes that. A better example would be: how about remake hn with shadcn ; I don’t think many would mind if it was still fast (which is not design anyway); it’s functional and clean. Reddit (new) is functional nor fast… that is not all design but js and all kinds of browser functionality hijacking to make it more likely you click on ads, lose your track so you go browse other things etc.
There are myriad of software that have been super popular despite having dodgy UI. But the whole point is not to care if your app is popular or not if the whole point is enjoying the process of building the app more than seeing it used by many.
Design and branding matter a lot more than people realize. Not just in terms of appeal - it sets the stage for everything that follows.
Half the social media apps are the same thing: Feed, like, block people, follow, post (with image/video, etc.), hash tags, etc. but the slightest difference in design and branding sets forth a different content platform.
UI/UX isn't just aesthetics, it's utility and a huge part of what the thing is.
Yeah, I think another way to think about this is "don't get distracted with cultivating and maintaining your brand", rather than "don't find any particular way that you enjoy doing the thing."
One of those is performative and creates pressure and expectation, often at the expense of personal enjoyment and rest. The other is just finding the bit that's interesting to you.
I think the sentiment is ok, but like you, I think the overall message is completely nonsense. It’s obviously fine to do things you aren’t enjoying as part of a process of to achieve your goals, and that doesn’t need to be about outside validation at all. I’m not very good at design, I don’t too much enjoy the process. Well I do enjoy parts of it when the hyperfocus sets in, but as a whole I don’t enjoy the process. I still do it, not because I care what anyone else will think about the end result but because, I, care about what, I, will think about it.
I’m sure the author is doing some sort of simplification of things. A lot of learning processes aren’t necessarily enjoyable and almost none are enjoyable all the time. I spend years learning how to airbrush while absolutely hating the process because I wanted to be able to do certain things. Now that I can actually make the stuff I envision I enjoy the process, but sucking at the beginning? Yeah that sucked. Hell, even if your end goal, is, outside validation… go for it!
But I do agree with the whole “life is short, so what you love” sentiment. It’s just that you could put it so much better and less condescending than the author does here.
It might be better to interpret in the context of the subtitle: “Advice for myself around leisure activities.”
If my advice is to myself, I don’t see how it is condescending. It seems by definition that it can’t be. I cannot pretend to be above me.
My summary of the sentiment would be “don’t allow the weight of imagined judgmental eyeballs to steal your joy in trying or pursuing your personal creative endeavour”
There is an irony in the blog now being seen at HN scale and judged.
This is excellent advice, but there is one exception: on the internet, behave as if your username was your real name and everyone was in the room with you. Don’t use the cover of anonymity to be mean. Act as if people knew you and remembered you.
Also these accounts will probably be de-anonymized at some point, between leaks and style matching. We aren’t famous, so mostly it is the same as anonymously yelling on a crowded street corner, but then most of our IRL interactions are similarly anonymous-by-obscurity…
I wanted to comment something on that same vein: you probably won't be famous, but someone will definitely read your blog when considering whether to hire and/or date you.
I applaud those that bad-mouth their previous employers because it makes my daily reading more interesting, but I can't in good conscience suggest that people should do it more.
That's easier said and done when half of the population between 15 and 45 are addicted to Instagram.
Even if a small percentage of them, say 5%, decide to emulate the famous people they follow we will have too many people who believe they are important.
Instagram likes and GitHub stars are exactly the same mechanism as far as someone who owns the content is concerned. Doing something 'to get famous', be it for your pouting selfies or your open source work, is basically the same, and anyone making a repo for the wrong reasons should heed the advice in this article. It is directly applicable to what they're doing.
For there to be famous people, there has to be non famous people. In the same way that up needs down, black needs white.
A figure I saw once was based on "do they have a Wikipedia page" as counting as famous. And the ratio was something like 50,000:1 relative to the population.
Would you bet your lives actions on a 50,000 to 1 chance? And even then do you think it would be possitive? Sometimes fame is the worst thing that can happen to someone. Being anonymous can be a blessing in disguise.
Postulating intellectual artifacts somehow bring contentment also can become unhealthy. As some folks spend their entire lives solving a civilizations perceived problems, and only later conclude most of the planet just isn't worth saving... if one becomes hapless as a consequence.
One may disagree, but that is an indulgence youthful idealism often prescribes. In conclusion, goldfish crackers are awesome... =3
I had a goal of programming every morning for an hour, and it wouldn’t stick… Once I dropped any pretense of making money, or getting anything out of it other than enjoying the craft, it has finally stuck.
It still takes discipline, I don't wake up every morning dying to program - sometimes the task at hand is boring, sometimes the motivation is not there, sometimes a little bit of a and a little bit of b. And I still code to a good standard of quality: I try to balance not being overly perfectionist, with making my practice deliberate so that I keep improving. For example, I test, refactor, document and plan with a backlog. But removing users from the equation lifts a massive weight from my shoulders. Like the article says, I leave that for work.
So, do the habit every day, but don't do it because of any secondary goal (like money), other than the immediate goal doing the habit itself.
Problem is, if you haven't completely bought into the habit yet, and it feels uncomfortable relative to other options, I don't know that you can avoid asking yourself "why" you're doing the habit.
In your example, I guess you already find programming fascinating, but hadn't found the discipline to practice regularly. But I still don't know how many people wouldn't abandon developing the habit if they get stuck in the weeds.
Imagine learning the violin, because you've liked to listen to classical music. It takes a lot of faith when you're stuck hearing how bad you sound at the beginning, and how you have to duck nasty glances or comments from others in your household that have to endure your practicing. A secondary goal might be to be admitted to an orchestra and do concerts that your friends and family might attend. But that being "vanity" means that we should only focus on the primary goal of enjoying violin music. Again, I see many people getting lost in the weeds without secondary goals of some sort acting as a lodestar.
I feel, the current generation of AAA Games are a great example for why you should make something you enjoy rather than something designed to make money. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 vs Skull and Bones. Make something you love and are passionate about. Get good at it. Use the Internet to show it to others that are passionate about the same thing - and there's a decent likelihood of success.
Baldurs Gate 3 is not really an indie passion project labor of love, its "just" a really good game. to me that's the big problem with AAA is that a lot of the time they're not even good
> The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. It implies several things that aren't true:
* That a hobby done for profit that can't also be done for fun.
* That a hobby for profit can't start as a profit-making venture, but turn into a passion.
* That work should be the only route to wealth.
* That optimizing for wealth can't go hand-in-hand with fun.
I despise the adage that a hobby is only a hobby if you aren't making money from it. I'm passionate about fantasy/sci-fi miniature building/painting, terrain modelling, and prop making. I love the expression of taking a universe that exists within the realms of novels and movies, and bringing it to the real world - to scale or in miniature. I design STLs/CAD models for 3D printing, scratch together terrain boards for people to play games on, paint miniatures any hour I get free, machine parts for various outfits and armaments, and spend hours fantasising about what universe I'm going to delve into next.
None of that would be possible if I didn't monetise the process. Most of what I build, I sell. If I didn't, I would neither be able to afford the hobby nor store the stuff I make. It would end up in a landfill. Parts of the hobby I took up explicitly because they demand higher prices when I sell it, but now they're some of the things I'm most passionate about.
Realistically, I'd love to do it as a full-time venture, but the semiconductor industry pays well and I'm not a famous maker so couldn't make it work - as the article states well enough. To suggest that hobbies can't both be fun and profitable though is a philosophy I think should be quashed.
And after a while, your hobby if physical will take space for things that are done, and that you don't need anymore. So why not resell them and fund the next steps ?
You raise another good point; is all monetization of a hobby the same? No, of course not. It's such a blanket statement to say "Save the money-making schemes for work".
Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.
I’m going to hard disagree with this. A lot of the enjoyment I get from creation is the process of others enjoying what I’ve built.
Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
depends on the project for me, but I'm totally with you
there's the things I do for me, because i would like for them to exist and have fun making it. But for anything that's not exactly that, having someone else care is extremely motivating
I think you're agreeing with the article without knowing it. Because you're doing what you enjoy at the end of the day.
For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
If others like it, that's great. If it doesn't get any attention, then it's OK, because I wrote that tool to fill my needs first.
The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy". It was saying "if you do this you will not be happy". If I end up happy you don't get to loop back and go "Well that was the goal! You agree with me!". The author also forgets that the author is their own audience. That audience is what one imagines others might be. The pursuit of that audience's approval is valuable.
>A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.
> The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy"
I disagree. Quoting the blog post itself:
so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
"Focus on what makes you enjoy the activity" means "do what makes you happy" in my parlance.
> Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good.
Absolutely no. I was always interested in visual design and set out to replicate what I saw and liked. I don't cater to anyone. My blog posts, coding style, and other things got negative comments, and I took note of them and thought about them, but I didn't agree with all of them, either. I only compete with myself and sharpen my axen the way I like. I'm chopping my own wood, so I don't need to optimize anything for others' wood.
In other areas of life, I have always chosen what to do, listen, watch and like. I don't yearn to fit in. In fact, I spent at least half of my life in a pretty opposite state.
I also get a big kick out of sharing my work with the world. But I think it's quite easy to lose yourself in it. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you start optimizing for what you think the audience wants, and not what you want (which is what the article is getting at I suppose).
So, I make a conscious effort to work on projects that are "just for me" from time to time, and I try to make that decision up-front.
I think I get the most out of my "for the world" projects overall - it's where I really push myself, like you describe - even though they're "leisure activities". But I still need the just-for-me projects to stay sane.
Yeah. I've been a lone programmer for a long time. It's very difficult to maintain focus and motivation. Sometimes it feels like it doesn't matter and that there's just no point to it all.
Yet people somehow find my work and tell me what they think of it. One day I came to HN and saw my project on the front page. At first I thought someone else had had the same idea as me. Then I started getting emails about it, about my website. Every time it happens it's incredibly motivating. It feels like I finally reached out to someone.
Making things just for yourself and your own enjoyment can be a very lonely activity and you might find yourself with some kind of audience anyway even without trying. That experience can change everything.
Uhmm, the correct way would be: 0. focus on less thing; 1. have fun doing them; don't stress about it, you're not competing; 2. do it, more and more.
The important point is to DO. Everything else will come, eventually.
Touché. It’s just fun to watch this attitude towards productivity go in cycles.
Yesterday they recommended that it was a glass of wine, and before that two glasses of red, then a bottle of white.
We kinda always knew it was wine, and like… stuff we can abstract away about blood pressure, moderation, hangovers, fond memories, and whatever, uncle Conrad.
No, we solve that particular thing like all things. But as a consumer, you’ve gotta average out the signal of strong claims.
“Eff it!” and “Obsess over it!”
are diametrically-opposed opinions about work, which I suspect many of us agree with both, a bit.
We try to explain it over and over again as each generation finds the same problems with new tools. Maybe it’s not that bad—but hey, at least my commentary was coherent enough to post ;p
> daydream about how you can make money off of it.
I do this but mostly from trauma of having to kill things due to hosting costs (happened before), as long as its cheap/self sufficient enough the fun part dominates.
I defiantly do not want to see people's typos move the language forward, especially when it's native speakers always making the same silly mistakes, for some reason (could of, they're/their, your's, etc.). I do like non-native speakers translating and incorporating their local sayings into English prose.
Not until my dying breath. The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
(My pet peeve is native speakers unable to pronounce "aesthetics" correctly. Drives me nuts. )
I do see where you are coming from but alas, language is an ever moving democracy. As much as many would like to define it in certain terms - it is largely beyond control.
This is why the English of Shakespeare doesn't hold up today because we are constantly adding and changing these things in a wonderfully organic fashion. It just makes it difficult to define.
The question is should we define it or is it like catching the wind with a net?
Another example is the word Monetize. It used to mean to turn a item into a form of money like currency. Almost nobody uses it like this nowadays. Decimate is another one.
Decimate meaning "kinda reduce the number" instead of "kill one person in 10"? I think it's been used with the first meaning in every language (including latin ones) for a long while.
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?
Because in my limited experience (I am fluent in only two other languages apart from English), "native grammar mistakes" only happen to native English speakers.
For example, I know Italian and French, yet I cannot think of any weird misspelling only native Italian or French speakers do. I always wondered if it's because of education or how grammar is taught in Anglosaxon countries that is ultimately the root cause of these errors. It is a peculiar phenomenon.
I'm French. I can't list them off the top of my head right this moment, but there definitely are annoying errors that natives do that are in the same category as "could of".
> The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Every language evolves. English evolved haphazardly, and gained all its rules, inconsistent pronunciation, and exceptions because of its very history and immigration by Angles, Saxons, Celts, Franks, Vikings in a period where a reference text like the King James bible didn't exist yet. At least that's how I understand it.
It’s a big debate indeed and I don’t want to get into it here, but I think I come down on the side of, “some standards are not purely popularity contests, but are based on other things.” There are a lot of reasons I think this way, but even if someone doesn’t agree, I do think a purely consequentialist approach is illustrative.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
You can make a really ugly, low quality change to a language, wait for a new generation to grow up with it and it will now be accepted as perfectly fine. There isn’t any objective notion of quality here
That doesn’t imply it’s perfectly fine, it might just mean that the arbiters have lost their ability to detect quality. Which is exactly what I think has happened.
What you call signs of quality are cultural signifiers. My native language is French, a language that has an actual gatekeeping administration (English doesn’t). The french I grew up with(not in the country of France) may be considered lower quality by some people because they aren’t used to it, but really what they mean is that I express a different set of cultural signifiers they are used to.
Unsurprisingly signs of language qualities have a tendency to reinforce the language spoken by people in power.
I don’t think those are the same things. I had in mind an example more like this:
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.
The possessive apostrophe originated as a mistake or idiosyncrasy, credited to one of two people in the early 1500s depending on who's making the assertion, that became widely adopted.
Possession should be, in static, unchanging, OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English, written "peoplees" (or something like that but you get the point).
Merely calling "'" an "apostrophe" was a mistake for over a century, as the word was a well-defined rhetorical term that was later adopted to describe the mark sometime during the mark's slow acceptance.
Grammarly makes people sound like soulless automatons who have been trained to write by similarly soulless and robotic corporate ad copy writers.
Sometimes it seems like half the English language is just Shakespeare or some other writer making up shit that sticks-- and that's awesome.
> OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English
Your point is well taken, but this attitude toward the orthography and grammar of English emerged several centuries after the 1500s. There was nothing resembling an accepted orthography when the personal apostrophe emerged. Everyone was winging it.
Prescriptive grammar peaked in the mid to late 1900s or thereabouts. Linguists are more relaxed about their approach to language these days. Most publications have a style guide, but if you don't have an editor, there's no reason to cargo-cult it.
But that's how languages evolved and will keep evolving. Whatever you take now as rules and whatever you write now thinking to be correct, was probably a mistake, shortcut or misunderstanding ages ago.
So what? 500 years later, a typo could be part of the English language taught in school. It doesn't mean that every single typo has to be accepted from day one as valid. Otherwise the mere concept of typo, or even the concept of English language itself, stops meaning anything.
I don't get the urge many English speakers have to justify any deviation (i.e. any typo) as valid and indisputable. There's grammar nazis, but there's also illiterate people :)
Awesome blog, I just loved the way wrote it. And I am totally agree with you. We don't need to be perfect or try to make perfect at first attempt, the more important is to enjoy the journey and honing the skills.
Good article, there is a certain level of being tied by what others might think while they don't give a damn actually. I guess this is somehow inherent to the US society (I am from Central Europe and don't observe this things at such scale) and it would be actually interesting to scientifically track the origins how it went this way
Living in the panopticon, it's really hard to take this advice to heart. You have to self-censor all the time as if in front of large audience, the leap to believing that audience is interested in the positive aspects of your output, to make the constant vigilance worth it, isn't large, however delusional it may be.
I have done this all my life (which is also ‘my career’); it paid off accidentally big time in the beginning (90-00s) which made me enough to retire, but I like what I do (as per the article). Now I still work the same way but the money just isn’t there anymore, and the only thing to at I don’t do vs people who make a lot worse stuff but make millions is: get out there and act like I am a rockstar/musk. I hate that social media posing but it seems it’s the difference; we all have seen products here on hn that were absolute garbage but because the creator is acting like some football hero who just scored, many people go for it and they get subscription payments and vc moneys.
I won’t change my ways as I have enough money, but I would be quite… not happy starting out in these times and having to pose and fake until I make etc.
I think all things you said will allow you to get rich. But more money isn’t everyone’s end goal, nor does that always lead to happiness (or even a “better” life)
This is probably good advice for someone else. For me, life got both a whole lot more interesting and a whole lot more fun when I started acting like I was famous.
I generally agree with the sentiment of doing what you enjoy first, and not thinking about an audience that may or may not exist, but the suggestions themselves will vary from person to person.
> Design is for an audience and you don’t have one.
It's wrong to generalize like this. Good design drives your work forward, and if you enjoy doing it, then by all means focus on that first.
Not appeasing an audience even when you have one is also a good idea. Art is an expression of the artist, and it dies once it starts being created for an audience.
My son put effort into dressing up for his Year 10 formal as that is what you do. But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others, and thought he should have spent a lot less effort into his outfit :)
I think the point is more around the collective distraction of dressing to a formal (and for kids, unfamiliar) standard, rather than enjoying time with the people around you at a party.
Or that's bad, because all those kids who spent time looking good, didn't get as many compliments for their effort than they expected, or perhaps even deserved.
There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.
(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)
Even Terence Tao advises mathematicians to develop their own personal style when writing mathematics. Your own personal style, based on your experiences, is what makes you unique and hence might make you famous.
You might not become famous by developing your own style but you'll definitely not be you if you don't.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadHowever, I disagree with the personal style part of things, or trying to make things look good. These things don't have to be about impressing an audience. It can be just as much about enjoying the process.
And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism.
For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.
Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.
with that said, I agree with your overall point, if you're determined to make something popular you shouldnt skimp on design
If you're saying design doesn't matter at all then changing the look of Hacker News to be like Reddit should have no effect on user satisfaction, signups, or usage.
I sense a bias toward minimalism (that I share) but that's still intentional design.
Half the social media apps are the same thing: Feed, like, block people, follow, post (with image/video, etc.), hash tags, etc. but the slightest difference in design and branding sets forth a different content platform.
UI/UX isn't just aesthetics, it's utility and a huge part of what the thing is.
One of those is performative and creates pressure and expectation, often at the expense of personal enjoyment and rest. The other is just finding the bit that's interesting to you.
I’m sure the author is doing some sort of simplification of things. A lot of learning processes aren’t necessarily enjoyable and almost none are enjoyable all the time. I spend years learning how to airbrush while absolutely hating the process because I wanted to be able to do certain things. Now that I can actually make the stuff I envision I enjoy the process, but sucking at the beginning? Yeah that sucked. Hell, even if your end goal, is, outside validation… go for it!
But I do agree with the whole “life is short, so what you love” sentiment. It’s just that you could put it so much better and less condescending than the author does here.
If my advice is to myself, I don’t see how it is condescending. It seems by definition that it can’t be. I cannot pretend to be above me.
My summary of the sentiment would be “don’t allow the weight of imagined judgmental eyeballs to steal your joy in trying or pursuing your personal creative endeavour”
There is an irony in the blog now being seen at HN scale and judged.
Prior to ML, it was computationally unfeasible to develop speculative dossiers on the majority of populations.
Best not think too deeply on the matter... Have a wonderful day =)
I applaud those that bad-mouth their previous employers because it makes my daily reading more interesting, but I can't in good conscience suggest that people should do it more.
Even if a small percentage of them, say 5%, decide to emulate the famous people they follow we will have too many people who believe they are important.
It's so weird some of the things people do.
A figure I saw once was based on "do they have a Wikipedia page" as counting as famous. And the ratio was something like 50,000:1 relative to the population.
Would you bet your lives actions on a 50,000 to 1 chance? And even then do you think it would be possitive? Sometimes fame is the worst thing that can happen to someone. Being anonymous can be a blessing in disguise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)
Postulating intellectual artifacts somehow bring contentment also can become unhealthy. As some folks spend their entire lives solving a civilizations perceived problems, and only later conclude most of the planet just isn't worth saving... if one becomes hapless as a consequence.
One may disagree, but that is an indulgence youthful idealism often prescribes. In conclusion, goldfish crackers are awesome... =3
Until the cheese mafia got to them. It's hard to get them without cheese now.
In that trying to force it is like Sisyphus. In giving up the battle, you are freed up to actually do it.
So your exaple is great, you had a good intention but once you gave up that structure then you actually got to the goal.
Problem is, if you haven't completely bought into the habit yet, and it feels uncomfortable relative to other options, I don't know that you can avoid asking yourself "why" you're doing the habit.
In your example, I guess you already find programming fascinating, but hadn't found the discipline to practice regularly. But I still don't know how many people wouldn't abandon developing the habit if they get stuck in the weeds.
Imagine learning the violin, because you've liked to listen to classical music. It takes a lot of faith when you're stuck hearing how bad you sound at the beginning, and how you have to duck nasty glances or comments from others in your household that have to endure your practicing. A secondary goal might be to be admitted to an orchestra and do concerts that your friends and family might attend. But that being "vanity" means that we should only focus on the primary goal of enjoying violin music. Again, I see many people getting lost in the weeds without secondary goals of some sort acting as a lodestar.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. It implies several things that aren't true:
* That a hobby done for profit that can't also be done for fun.
* That a hobby for profit can't start as a profit-making venture, but turn into a passion.
* That work should be the only route to wealth.
* That optimizing for wealth can't go hand-in-hand with fun.
I despise the adage that a hobby is only a hobby if you aren't making money from it. I'm passionate about fantasy/sci-fi miniature building/painting, terrain modelling, and prop making. I love the expression of taking a universe that exists within the realms of novels and movies, and bringing it to the real world - to scale or in miniature. I design STLs/CAD models for 3D printing, scratch together terrain boards for people to play games on, paint miniatures any hour I get free, machine parts for various outfits and armaments, and spend hours fantasising about what universe I'm going to delve into next.
None of that would be possible if I didn't monetise the process. Most of what I build, I sell. If I didn't, I would neither be able to afford the hobby nor store the stuff I make. It would end up in a landfill. Parts of the hobby I took up explicitly because they demand higher prices when I sell it, but now they're some of the things I'm most passionate about.
Realistically, I'd love to do it as a full-time venture, but the semiconductor industry pays well and I'm not a famous maker so couldn't make it work - as the article states well enough. To suggest that hobbies can't both be fun and profitable though is a philosophy I think should be quashed.
Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.
Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
there's the things I do for me, because i would like for them to exist and have fun making it. But for anything that's not exactly that, having someone else care is extremely motivating
For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
If others like it, that's great. If it doesn't get any attention, then it's OK, because I wrote that tool to fill my needs first.
>A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.
I disagree. Quoting the blog post itself:
"Focus on what makes you enjoy the activity" means "do what makes you happy" in my parlance.> Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good.
Absolutely no. I was always interested in visual design and set out to replicate what I saw and liked. I don't cater to anyone. My blog posts, coding style, and other things got negative comments, and I took note of them and thought about them, but I didn't agree with all of them, either. I only compete with myself and sharpen my axen the way I like. I'm chopping my own wood, so I don't need to optimize anything for others' wood.
In other areas of life, I have always chosen what to do, listen, watch and like. I don't yearn to fit in. In fact, I spent at least half of my life in a pretty opposite state.
I also get a big kick out of sharing my work with the world. But I think it's quite easy to lose yourself in it. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you start optimizing for what you think the audience wants, and not what you want (which is what the article is getting at I suppose).
So, I make a conscious effort to work on projects that are "just for me" from time to time, and I try to make that decision up-front.
I think I get the most out of my "for the world" projects overall - it's where I really push myself, like you describe - even though they're "leisure activities". But I still need the just-for-me projects to stay sane.
Yet people somehow find my work and tell me what they think of it. One day I came to HN and saw my project on the front page. At first I thought someone else had had the same idea as me. Then I started getting emails about it, about my website. Every time it happens it's incredibly motivating. It feels like I finally reached out to someone.
Making things just for yourself and your own enjoyment can be a very lonely activity and you might find yourself with some kind of audience anyway even without trying. That experience can change everything.
I do enjoy writing and editing.
Art is there to create experiences for people. If somebody writes a novel in the woods, but nobody is there to read it, does it really make sound?
0. Do less things
1. Do things at a natural pace
2. Obsess over quality
3. Don’t obsess over quality, eff the haters!
4. Do more things
;)
Yesterday they recommended that it was a glass of wine, and before that two glasses of red, then a bottle of white.
We kinda always knew it was wine, and like… stuff we can abstract away about blood pressure, moderation, hangovers, fond memories, and whatever, uncle Conrad.
No, we solve that particular thing like all things. But as a consumer, you’ve gotta average out the signal of strong claims.
“Eff it!” and “Obsess over it!”
are diametrically-opposed opinions about work, which I suspect many of us agree with both, a bit.
We try to explain it over and over again as each generation finds the same problems with new tools. Maybe it’s not that bad—but hey, at least my commentary was coherent enough to post ;p
I do this but mostly from trauma of having to kill things due to hosting costs (happened before), as long as its cheap/self sufficient enough the fun part dominates.
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
(My pet peeve is native speakers unable to pronounce "aesthetics" correctly. Drives me nuts. )
This is why the English of Shakespeare doesn't hold up today because we are constantly adding and changing these things in a wonderfully organic fashion. It just makes it difficult to define.
The question is should we define it or is it like catching the wind with a net?
Another example is the word Monetize. It used to mean to turn a item into a form of money like currency. Almost nobody uses it like this nowadays. Decimate is another one.
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?
For example, I know Italian and French, yet I cannot think of any weird misspelling only native Italian or French speakers do. I always wondered if it's because of education or how grammar is taught in Anglosaxon countries that is ultimately the root cause of these errors. It is a peculiar phenomenon.
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Agree with that one though :)
Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
Is quality of language and taste opinion or fact? I could see the debate being vigorous on that one.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
Unsurprisingly signs of language qualities have a tendency to reinforce the language spoken by people in power.
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.
(I originally corrected the use of "it's")
The possessive apostrophe originated as a mistake or idiosyncrasy, credited to one of two people in the early 1500s depending on who's making the assertion, that became widely adopted.
Possession should be, in static, unchanging, OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English, written "peoplees" (or something like that but you get the point).
Merely calling "'" an "apostrophe" was a mistake for over a century, as the word was a well-defined rhetorical term that was later adopted to describe the mark sometime during the mark's slow acceptance.
Grammarly makes people sound like soulless automatons who have been trained to write by similarly soulless and robotic corporate ad copy writers.
Sometimes it seems like half the English language is just Shakespeare or some other writer making up shit that sticks-- and that's awesome.
Your point is well taken, but this attitude toward the orthography and grammar of English emerged several centuries after the 1500s. There was nothing resembling an accepted orthography when the personal apostrophe emerged. Everyone was winging it.
Prescriptive grammar peaked in the mid to late 1900s or thereabouts. Linguists are more relaxed about their approach to language these days. Most publications have a style guide, but if you don't have an editor, there's no reason to cargo-cult it.
I don't get the urge many English speakers have to justify any deviation (i.e. any typo) as valid and indisputable. There's grammar nazis, but there's also illiterate people :)
Other than that, in normal conversations, these mistakes are part of our personal identity if you ask me.
It gives you suggestions, and marks your errors. It's up to you to decide which ones to add, which ones to ignore.
I generally use its punctual help, and want to see its suggestions about my sentence structure and flow, since English is not my native language.
Also, I use its advice on different levels depending on the recipient of the text I'm writing, plus the length of the text itself.
What if I enjoy optimizing for a non-existent audience?
I won’t change my ways as I have enough money, but I would be quite… not happy starting out in these times and having to pose and fake until I make etc.
> Design is for an audience and you don’t have one.
It's wrong to generalize like this. Good design drives your work forward, and if you enjoy doing it, then by all means focus on that first.
Not appeasing an audience even when you have one is also a good idea. Art is an expression of the artist, and it dies once it starts being created for an audience.
Genuinely, that is good. People who care and judge how others look beyond normal social propriety tend to be pretty bad to be around.
There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.
(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)
Watch how many of them are buying exactly what their friends buy, so they can fit in and relax a bit.
You might not become famous by developing your own style but you'll definitely not be you if you don't.