I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.
One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.
This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.
I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.
All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.
But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you.
Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project way.
Blissful Zen is a great way to put it.
Story: My mother had 2 of her 3 dogs die on the same day. We buried them in the backyard as we have many little friends before them. This was the first time I dug the graves (my dad had always beared that -- but he passed away last year).
The grave soil was very clay rich. I had recently seen a video on how to reclaim natural clay. It was very rewarding to turn the natural clay into workable clay.
But the real challenge -- how to fire it? I saw guys using charcoal and bricks in their driveway but that can't get hot enough.
So the real Zen has been building an electric kiln from scratch. It is a simple-ish problem with a whole lot of simplish steps. Perfect to keep my mind occupied when it needs to be. I have also learned an amazing amount (about clay, pottery, kilns, Arduino/ESP32, thermocouples, resistance wire, refractory cement, insulation, electrical code, weird soldering techniques, and many more).
It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I'm wasting time.
This has lead to many, many side projects throughout the years, which I tend to like a zen garden[1]. Pruning, refining, improving, and sometimes rewriting.
As soon as I work out the game mechanics of any game, I just see it as just content now, and there is nothing holding me back to play any longer. Same with watching TV shows or movies, I lose interest pretty quickly and feel an urge to create something.
I've always been very in tune with time, our lack of it, and felt like consumption is a waste of time.
That said I believe creativity is hormonal (that is only my personal belief, unproven). It comes and goes. Some days I can't stop creating, somedays I want netflix and chill. But that's 10 days cycle of sorts, 10 days on, 10 days off.
Depending on where you live, it's perfectly normal that due to current events, or a personal loss in your life, etc. you might not feel the creative bug tickling you. The creative hormone might be totally wiped by your current environment or predicament; tiredness, anger, stress, all play into it.
After all, since our early days in the caves, drawing on walls, Humans wouldn't do so unless they had safety, a full belly, and a warm fire. A place to call home. Creative time needs conditions to be filled.
I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment.
Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious about what I should be doing with my time instead.
I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.
Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a sanctuary
My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi network onto my router so that their cell customers would get more wifi coverage or something.
So I ordered a DOCSIS 3.1 modem off amazon, then went and rummaged around in my storage box for an old 2013 macbook air, installed ubuntu server on it, and finally learned how to setup a home router with DHCP, DNS, NAT, firewall, etc. Pihole was a lot of that, and I installed it as a docker container so that was a fun thing to learn to manage as well.
As an aside, ChatGPT made most of this possible. I have used *nix off and on for 25 years but haven't done serious system administration in at least 15 years. ChatGPT is definitely the crutch I needed to get off my ass and do more side projects.
As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that
Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32, getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and...
So yeah, it enables my brain to just chase the inspiration rabbit without getting too bogged down in infrastructure.
My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code.
It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects.
In the last three months I have:
- Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).
- Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS development machines
- Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin UI (learning React/Vite)
- Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home network performance
- Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up my learning and get me unblocked when working on something unfamiliar
The freedom to over engineer the shit out of something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to compromise a lot in my day job!
> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)
I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.
How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?
My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?
Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I think: non-goal oriented growth.
I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the time, space and money to enjoy side projects again. Music, art, coding for the love of making something with no other reason than doing. I stopped thinking anything had to be anything - it just was. I could do for the sake of doing and it was liberating.
I've been very happy about this, it's been a blessing mentally. And very productive. I've enjoyed time and space, and I appreciate (again!) how lucky I am to be here.
A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)
Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3 coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by Friday.
I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to familiarity.
Great metaphor but I feel like my day job is graffiti style crap code that just barely passes QA while all of my side project code is the good good 3 coats of SW superpaint
"consumption-to-creation ratio" are words i've never put to that positive feeling of choosing to code over watching another TV show or the negative feeling of the alternative choice.
recently i feel like vibe coding is a cheat code in this respect - i can code while watching TV... and a few times the output of the vibe coding exercise was interesting enough to switch to full attention coding.
I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting until I'm happy.
At work they rely on me to deliver in a reasonable time, and move on to the next task. Once something is working, it generally isn't changed too much, even to improve it (obviously if it's really important to improve it we make time for that, but that doesn't happen so often)
I think it's nice to be able to write something well, polished and sturdy. Something better than at work. higher ideals.
Or, to write something that is house of cards nonsense that would never fly at work but does something fun. You don't have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is the BEST.
I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.
One of them is a years long passion that consists of several, large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I’ll call about the 75% mark.
I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.
My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the span of 2 weeks.
It’s hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator as a baseline.
“Computers are deterministic!” Hah! Not this one!
But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.
I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]
This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.
These two lines really hit home:
> You don’t have to listen to any other voices here, except that quiet one inside of you that’s gently urging you to do the thing you know you need to do.
> You don’t need to know where it’s going to lead. For that matter, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to come of it.
That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right (to me).
I've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well.
A lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.
I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then
I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.
I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.
I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it, within a year or two I might be able to have enough license revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at that point??)
A million years ago (in the age of “made in Dreamweaver” badges on web sites) I had a dumb little ball-and-stick image of adenosine triphosphate and I made a dumb little “made with ATP” badge, because I typed out html with plain-vanilla vim.
"The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements."
I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.
One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.
This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.
I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.
All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.
But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.
> I decided to go for Python
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you. Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project way.
Blissful Zen is a great way to put it.
Story: My mother had 2 of her 3 dogs die on the same day. We buried them in the backyard as we have many little friends before them. This was the first time I dug the graves (my dad had always beared that -- but he passed away last year).
The grave soil was very clay rich. I had recently seen a video on how to reclaim natural clay. It was very rewarding to turn the natural clay into workable clay.
But the real challenge -- how to fire it? I saw guys using charcoal and bricks in their driveway but that can't get hot enough.
So the real Zen has been building an electric kiln from scratch. It is a simple-ish problem with a whole lot of simplish steps. Perfect to keep my mind occupied when it needs to be. I have also learned an amazing amount (about clay, pottery, kilns, Arduino/ESP32, thermocouples, resistance wire, refractory cement, insulation, electrical code, weird soldering techniques, and many more).
First fire will be tomorrow.
It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I'm wasting time.
This has lead to many, many side projects throughout the years, which I tend to like a zen garden[1]. Pruning, refining, improving, and sometimes rewriting.
As soon as I work out the game mechanics of any game, I just see it as just content now, and there is nothing holding me back to play any longer. Same with watching TV shows or movies, I lose interest pretty quickly and feel an urge to create something.
I've always been very in tune with time, our lack of it, and felt like consumption is a waste of time.
That said I believe creativity is hormonal (that is only my personal belief, unproven). It comes and goes. Some days I can't stop creating, somedays I want netflix and chill. But that's 10 days cycle of sorts, 10 days on, 10 days off.
Depending on where you live, it's perfectly normal that due to current events, or a personal loss in your life, etc. you might not feel the creative bug tickling you. The creative hormone might be totally wiped by your current environment or predicament; tiredness, anger, stress, all play into it.
After all, since our early days in the caves, drawing on walls, Humans wouldn't do so unless they had safety, a full belly, and a warm fire. A place to call home. Creative time needs conditions to be filled.
[1] https://noben.org
I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment.
Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious about what I should be doing with my time instead.
I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.
Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a sanctuary
My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi network onto my router so that their cell customers would get more wifi coverage or something.
So I ordered a DOCSIS 3.1 modem off amazon, then went and rummaged around in my storage box for an old 2013 macbook air, installed ubuntu server on it, and finally learned how to setup a home router with DHCP, DNS, NAT, firewall, etc. Pihole was a lot of that, and I installed it as a docker container so that was a fun thing to learn to manage as well.
As an aside, ChatGPT made most of this possible. I have used *nix off and on for 25 years but haven't done serious system administration in at least 15 years. ChatGPT is definitely the crutch I needed to get off my ass and do more side projects.
As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that
Why would it be obviously ridiculous if it granted the parent commenter so much productivity?
Perhaps the same obvious ridiculousness that manual agrarians passed upon the tractor.
Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32, getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and...
So yeah, it enables my brain to just chase the inspiration rabbit without getting too bogged down in infrastructure.
Shout out to all those generous souls who posted how-to's and project notes for their IoT projects, so that machines could learn from them.
My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code. It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).
- Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS development machines
- Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin UI (learning React/Vite)
- Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home network performance
- Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up my learning and get me unblocked when working on something unfamiliar The freedom to over engineer the shit out of something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to compromise a lot in my day job!
> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)
I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.
How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?
My side projects have always mirrored work to a certain extent, kind of building what I wish I could really do at work.
Led to my current job, which I love. Hopefully this lasts.
I love this.
My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?
Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I think: non-goal oriented growth.
I agree with that last bit - sometimes you gotta drop the time associated with polish of a finished product and play around.
Always stuck with me that pretty much every famous piece of art has a long backlog of practice to get to that point.
I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the time, space and money to enjoy side projects again. Music, art, coding for the love of making something with no other reason than doing. I stopped thinking anything had to be anything - it just was. I could do for the sake of doing and it was liberating.
I've been very happy about this, it's been a blessing mentally. And very productive. I've enjoyed time and space, and I appreciate (again!) how lucky I am to be here.
A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)
Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3 coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by Friday.
I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to familiarity.
Great metaphor but I feel like my day job is graffiti style crap code that just barely passes QA while all of my side project code is the good good 3 coats of SW superpaint
Graffiti can be as beautiful or messy as you want! You can put any amount of effort in to the craft
this resonates.
"consumption-to-creation ratio" are words i've never put to that positive feeling of choosing to code over watching another TV show or the negative feeling of the alternative choice.
recently i feel like vibe coding is a cheat code in this respect - i can code while watching TV... and a few times the output of the vibe coding exercise was interesting enough to switch to full attention coding.
I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting until I'm happy.
At work they rely on me to deliver in a reasonable time, and move on to the next task. Once something is working, it generally isn't changed too much, even to improve it (obviously if it's really important to improve it we make time for that, but that doesn't happen so often)
I think it's nice to be able to write something well, polished and sturdy. Something better than at work. higher ideals.
Or, to write something that is house of cards nonsense that would never fly at work but does something fun. You don't have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is the BEST.
Oh absolutely, the real win is being able to play with a concept with no risk
I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.
One of them is a years long passion that consists of several, large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I’ll call about the 75% mark.
I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.
My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the span of 2 weeks.
It’s hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator as a baseline.
“Computers are deterministic!” Hah! Not this one!
But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.
I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]
[1] summary by Gemini
Thanks for citing your AI source, it's really much appreciated. But having read that book, it can't be properly summarized by AI.
I had no idea what I was getting into with that book
This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.
These two lines really hit home:
> You don’t have to listen to any other voices here, except that quiet one inside of you that’s gently urging you to do the thing you know you need to do.
> You don’t need to know where it’s going to lead. For that matter, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to come of it.
That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right (to me).
I've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well. A lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.
I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then
I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.
I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.
I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it, within a year or two I might be able to have enough license revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at that point??)
-Written by human, not AI
Love that you added this to the footer on your website. Goodbye ‘organic’ and ‘non-GMO’ and hello ‘AI-Free’ XD
A million years ago (in the age of “made in Dreamweaver” badges on web sites) I had a dumb little ball-and-stick image of adenosine triphosphate and I made a dumb little “made with ATP” badge, because I typed out html with plain-vanilla vim.
That badge is from Not By AI: https://notbyai.fyi/about
"The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements."
How do people with kids do this kind of stuff lol?
Late nights and not enough sleep