Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

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> Stop lying to yourself because it's not doing yourself any good. The only reason you're not releasing your side projects to the world is because you are afraid of criticism.

I often set the bar so high there is no chance I could ever finish. The only projects that are attractive and shiny enough are those that are too big to finish.

E.g. I could choose between writing, completing and shipping a small indie game. Or I could write an OS from scratch, or the next Unreal Engine because I think it looks shiny.

Obviously I have no chance in hell of compleing a AAA game engine. Or an OS that does any more than say "Hello world" on boot. But I can pretend to be writing a AAA game engine - and I can keep pretending for many nights, until I have 1% of a game engine. At that point, there is probably something shinier that gets my attention.

So releasing it to the world: Obviously: I could put my 1% of a game engine on github for everyone to see, and that would be "releasing it to the world". But most likely no one would see it! I have hundreds of projects sitting around in various stages of completeness. Perhaps 2 or 3 were ever in some kind of usable state - and what they do have in common is that it was horrible to "finish" them in terms of making a proper repo, readmes, deployments, setups etc...

The reason finishing stuff and shipping them is so boring is because even a trivially small project that people actually want to use will have a ton of work required that aren't coding. I have no interest deploying a web app, no interest in drawing (or searching for) graphics for the little indie game etc. I'd rather make a new placeholder game than finishing the first one! I just want to code. I don't mind showing my code. I just normally don't want make a finished product of it. I get enough of that at work.

Edit: noticed someone said pretty much exactly this already and you responded. Oh well.

I find your OS example a little bit misplaced considering a quite complex OS can be completed by one person (obviously more complete than "hello world") but regardless of that, the commercial value of a new OS is quite low but the usefullness of learned (I'd say) is quite high.

Hell, even Terry A. David completed TempleOS, and he's mentally ill.

So yeah you sure could complete and release shit, you just don't want to for some reason or other.

That's like saying even Michael Jordan was able to win an NBA title, and he has freakishly large hands!

Terry is a force of nature.

Yeah, that's a pretty fucking ableist thing to say, so maybe you could just not say it.

Turns out some crazy smart people are...crazy and smart.

> I often set the bar so high there is no chance I could ever finish. The only projects that are attractive and shiny enough are those that are too big to finish.

This reminds of a chapter in "Computer Power and Human Reason" where Joseph Weizenbaum describes the differences between compulsive programmers and professionals.

> His main interest is, in any case, not in small programs, but in very large, very ambitious systems of programs. Usually the systems he undertakes to build, and on which he works feverishly for perhaps a month or two or three, have very grandiose but extremely imprecisely stated goals. [...] It is characteristic of many such projects that the programmer can long continue in the conviction that they demand knowledge about nothing but computers, programming, etc. And that knowledge he, of course, commands in abundance. Indeed, the point at which such work is often abandoned is precisely when it ceases to be purely incestuous, i.e., when programming would have to be interrupted in order that knowledge from outside the computer world may be acquired.

My interest is usually more in some specific problem or algorithm. I'm curious how subsurface scattering works so I write a sloppy pathtracer just to act as a shell for what I really wanted to do - the complex algorithm. Once I get it half working I'm done, because the goal was neither to make a product or to finish even the subsurface scattering part perfectly, the goal was to code and to understand the algorithm.

I'm not really in it to create, and that's perhaps the key. I write programs because that's how I understand problems. If I could understand something by reading a book or Wikipedia page then I'd often just do that and not have to do the coding at all!

Doing this kind of superficial learning-through-coding is fantastically effective I must say.

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