I joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
Yes, but that often breaks down once you have bills to pay and need steady income. Real life tends to complicate things. The risk-averse path is a valid choice too, and often the only sensible one.
I see these blogs sometimes and they smell like Adderal. Have you considered that the thing you’re endlessly tinkering with may not be the thing actually providing the enjoyment you feel?
I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.
I like doing goofy things with code. I wrote an s-expression parser using TeraTerm (BASIC-like language). I came up with this generator only recursive descent thing in python. I never did anything with these except to fiddle around and see what was possible. Goofy stuff in code makes me happy.
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
Mostly FUD from grifters and accelerationists. Coding AI isn't useful for producing things that you couldn't have produced yourself, which means you're still important. Fundamentally it's still "just" an autocomplete, whether it's snippets at your cursor or whole files inside your directory. I actually quite enjoy LLMs as a programmer. Contrast this with compilers, which produce machine code that you couldn't have possibly written yourself.
Who cares? Just disable or pay no heed to AI. Did you stop correcting your prose because spellcheck or grammarly could do it for you? Sometimes the human thing to do is to be the opposite of the zeitgeist.
AI is the latest line of trends. It will pass like everything else. Unless they are offering to buddy up with you for a project, why care about how other people would do it?
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
The rules to being good at something will never change. I like the (overused) Bruce Lee quote "Once you see the way you see it in all things". I always interpreted that as just looping over: Do something mindfully, reflect on your outcomes, do it again.
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
That still feels a bit off, as you are "having fun" because it ultimately is the road to success.
There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.
Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
The Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer.
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
I really resonate with it. When I was a teenager I was a burn out. I went to college and became enamoured with a field of study. Everyone thought I was very smart and people would drop the g word and it made me feel gross. I always just wanted to learn everything I could.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
This is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
I definitely worked with people who were limited by how much they were open to just dive one level deeper. You can wait for someone to explain things to you and tell you what to read, or just... go and do it. There's no speed limit in learning. This is even easier now with AI since you can ask "what's this concept called, what am I missing here, what stuff should I read about it" if you're actually blocked.
Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting:
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages
I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.
I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.
I like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the
enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
jyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
What a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
67 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 76.6 ms ] threadI went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
https://lobste.rs/s/wilmno/i_m_just_having_fun#c_ziuqlv
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX
There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.
Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
I down vote it every time I see it.
That magenta PR? Fetch.
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.