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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I have also finished 6 side projects last year: 1) Moving the washing machine with all plumbing to the attic. 2) Getting the kids to school on time everyday. 3) Having the kids eat at least 1 piece of fruit each day. 4) Redid my front garden to make it easier to park 3 bikes. 5) Made a bunk bed in my caravan for the two kids. 6) Played a bit with the Bittrex api and made a small overview website for myself.

I'm feeling pretty good about those things (and actually I did even more, bathing my 1 y/o daughter every two days, also quite some work. I also helped in teaching my son to wipe his own butt and wash his hands without touching anything else on the way to the tap... I could go on...).

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This year was the launch of Daughter 2.0 (years). I must say, this product is looking to be awesome. Although she sometimes intentionally doesn't follow the instructions I give her.

Unlike Daughter 1.0 that simply didn't follow instructions because she wasn't programmed to do so yet.

I must say, Daughter 0.1 was fun to conceive but the nine months leading up to launch were rough and the year after we first showed her to the public we had a lot of issues to work out. Me and my partner were up all night for a year working out bugs.

I'm still working on launching my Basement Playroom side project. I have the walls framed out but finding an outsourcing firm for the wiring for a reasonable price has been tough. Finishing the Baby-proofing side project felt good though.

I also have two software side projects. Both built on AWS Lambda... those have gotten nowhere due to my primary hustle.

That's still the fun part. Wait until your product starts getting traction and you need to build 24/7 customer support capabilities.

The real hard part is we don't have enough funding to recruit more staff and I don't think we'll have an exit until we hit version 18.0 and that won't be for 16 more years. And even then, I hear some projects get to version 24.0 before being able to be self sustaining.

I've heard that you can allocate roughly 25% FTE by version 14.0.

I'm only on v3.5 of the first product. Generally the AI is working well, deep learning is starting to show dividends in many areas. Last night the Self Tidying function actually worked for the first time, although some items were not necessarily stored at the correct allocation addresses. The main problems we're encountering now is AI self awareness and trying to force its own learning path, despite continual re-training on controlled datasets.

Use less reinforcement and more random forest.

This whole thread feels like I'm reading r/outside, the HN version. I like it.

As long as you’re default live you should be proud.

Not to mention that support gets really demanding once you hit version 13.0. Also, for Daughter 16.0+ I hear a good firewall is essential.

Honest question here:

Why do people use my partner and I, and not my spouse and I?

In all honesty, when I read my partner and I and I assume it is a same-sex couple, and spouse and I as a heterosexual couple.

Did language change when describe couples?

Why do you assume same sex couple? It could just be a couple that decided to have a child together without getting married,

I actually chose to use the word "partner" because it is more closely analog to the startup metaphor (i.e. "business partner") so it fit the joke better.

Impressive! How did you get all that done without any "public deadline" and "sharing your work" with the rest of the world? Also, I guess there was only few "supportive feedback for what you’re doing" (perhaps just from a single person, but how much does that count?), which makes this even more impressive.

Loved this -- you called these "side-projects", but in general, this is "life" :-)....you do a lot of incidental "stuff". Specially when you have kids.

You should, that stuff is awesome!!!

Curious to know what your method was to teaching the butt wiping. I need to teach my kid this.

It's nice when they can wipe their own butt, a milestone.

Congratulations! :)

Some people prefer to maximize earnings and then outsource manual labour. Also processes are not projects. The website sounds cool though.

I'm just adding it here because bathing your daughter every 2 days (and getting her to bed clean, well fed and happy) is a ton of work which you don't want to outsource and can not add to your CV or Github page.

To be honest, even if you don't have kids and are just tired of work in the evenings, my advice would be: Don't let these over-energetic side project cannons get under your skin. Just making a living is something to be proud of as well. People who write such posts may be good side project creators, but they may suck at other things. Or maybe they don't, maybe they are better people in every respect. I choose not to care, or perhaps better: I choose to try consciously not to allow myself to feel bad about this.

It's hard enough in this connected world to try and find out what you like, feeling down comparing yourself to super productive people will only do that: make you feel down. It's the worst feeling to have while you're trying to find out what makes your clock tick (inhibiting I would even say). Young people often don't know what makes them enthusiastic, nothing wrong with that, also nothing wrong if it is doing nothing, daydreaming instead of firing off side project after side project. It'll come... Or it won't. First mission: Accept yourself as you are.

I'm thinking they're probably just more unmarried, more childless people in every respect.

That's a pretty big assumption, probably not based on anything other than your gut feeling?

Well thinking it is not based on research, otherwise I would say after researching the matter... so based on my gut feeling, I guess, maybe based on feelings on how many side projects I used to get done in a year versus how many I get done now. I don't know that I would call it an assumption, since an assumption I think of as something I will proceed from, as the basis of decisions and I'm not making any particular decisions based on what I think on this issue.

Children consume a great deal of time and energy. Even after they're bathed and put to bed, cleaning and preparing for the next day eat into "adult" time in the night. Even splitting a perfect 50/50 with your partner (if you have one) doesn't leave much time for personal projects.

Having a house also means spending time on its care. Not nearly as much as children, but it's a non negligible amount.

Marriage can be less of a barrier to personal projects. Just depending your relationship and schedule.

LOL! I'd say it's a fairly minor assumption to say he probably doesn't have small children. The sheer amount of time and effort that children can consume is mindblowing. A six month old gets bored in ways I didn't think possible for something with so little experience in the world. And god forbid you walk away to do some chore, the cry of abandonment makes it impossible to focus on anything else. And then you think, oh by 6 they should be able to help with things, but the mental effort to get any sort of chore out the child dwarfs the effort to do the chore yourself. And when all the children are finally asleep, that's when the PTSD shows itself. Will a child decide bedtime wasn't executed to their liking and come knocking on your door in 30 minutes? And when will the youngest cry for their first night time feeding? Can I start this activity that will likely take an hour? Do I dare stay up? or will tonight be a 4 cries in 4 hours kind of night?

> And when all the children are finally asleep, that's when the PTSD shows itself.

So true. Or if they get sick and you wonder when it'll hit you too – in an hour, tomorrow or in a week. Having 2 kids is, at times, the most stressful and anxiety-inducing thing I ever did in my entire life.

@jeffhuys my gut feel says you don't have childeren. At least not in the 0-3 yr range :-)

(Could not reply directly to sibling comment)

I've been on a mini-quest to reject the concept of exceptionalism.

It started with an observation that everywhere we traveled seemed wonderful and fun, full of people who can't imagine living anywhere else. Every place[1] seems to have some thing that makes it feel special when you visit. If you live there, it's a different story, though. Sort of like how people who live in Philadelphia don't visit the Liberty Bell. Or there are only just so many times you can visit the museums in Washington DC before the daily routine of life breaks the spell.

I grew up in a rural town and worked pretty hard to find a job that would move me out of it. Having lived in a few major cities now, I can say that the place that you live doesn't have a lot of impact on how happy you can be. I was depressed when I lived in the middle of nowhere and I was depressed all over again shortly after moving to a big city. It wasn't until I started letting go of the concept of finding happiness through acquiring lifestyle markers that I started feeling whole.

And I've noticed this applies to pretty much everything. Everyone has a cherished childhood toy or video game or movie to which every new experience is compared. Everyone has a story about their university experience that ends with, "you just had to be there, it was a different time. The place was never the same after." Everyone has an in-the-trenches story about an old job.

But those experiences are apocryphal. Other people were having similar experiences with other things, repeated cookie-cutter across the world. The particular things they were experiencing may have even been better than what we experienced. But that's not why things are great. Our memories of the greatness of things are not a function of how good they were in comparison to other things, or how few people got to experience them as well. Our experience of greatness is a function of our being present in the moment, absorbing and making memories of the feelings we had. Why should the knowledge that some other folks experienced a better thing, or many other folks experienced the same thing we did, change how we feel about what happened to us? They can't go into the past and change events. We still have those memories of those feelings.

And then we die and it all evaporates. There will be mostly no record of the wonders we experienced. What little record will be stored and propagated will mostly go completely ignored. And what little that will be received will be misinterpreted.

This applies to everything. The Quest for The Best is a fallacy, as it presumes the ability to replay all choices in parallel universes and select the universe that has the best results (assuming we can even calculate what The Best even means). Yet so many people are consumed by finding The Best and rejecting everything else. It locks them into a cycle of indecision as they thrash over infinite options, causing an ever growing anxiety that feeds into itself.

Sound like anything? Arguing politics. Choosing a restaurant in a group. Choosing a meal once/if you ever get there. Choosing an application development framework. We choose to attempt to drink from the fire hose, then reinterpret it as drowning in a hurricane at sea when you could just remove your head from the fire hose stream.

Be resolute in accepting that you will die and that none of the struggle for anything beyond your own happiness, enjoyment, and completeness matters. You are free to choose what will compose your happiness. You have a place in life and it is your own place that you are free to enjoy, regardless of how unique or objectively great it might be.

Ironically, once you do that, you might even be able to achieve the clarity and focus of mind necessary to make a unique and great thing. Because you won't care, you'll just make the thing for your enjoyment.

[1] to which one would travel, granted. Old coal mining towns are just exercises in communal depression.

I've noticed that the "ordinary" things in life like getting married, or the birth of your first child are exceptional when they happen to you.

i was just thinking this morning that the eventual legacy of the US just might be the understanding that exceptionalism is largely a myth. the US has been this great experiement in individualism (among many other things), and while the country has had a great run, we're learning over and over again that we individuals stand on the shoulders of giants (of our own making), that our accomplishments are a peculiarity of both our own efforts as well as those of hundreds if not thousands of other people.

it's great to celebrate our accomplishments, but attributing those accomplishments to a single person--as tidy and satisfying as that might be--is simply incorrect (e.g., steve jobs, bill gates, elon musk, etc.).

> Because you won't care, you'll just make the thing for your enjoyment.

bingo. that is the lesson to be learned. it's all about the journey, not the destination. it really matters zero if you actually ship or release any side projects. all that really matters is the enjoyment working on it.

Well said.

> Our experience of greatness is a function of our being present in the moment, absorbing and making memories of the feelings we had. Why should the knowledge that some other folks experienced a better thing, or many other folks experienced the same thing we did, change how we feel about what happened to us?

Back in the early 90s I had the highest score on the Street Fighter(?) cabinet in the local pizza joint. Try as they might, nobody could beat it-- I was a god amongst the neighborhood kids. Then 1996 came around, and with the internet came evidence of what high scores other people around the world were hitting. The best I could do, what my peers were proud of me for, meant nothing when held up against the greater community. My world was crushed. I was nothing special. If my friends were this proud of a loser, then they must be losers themselves.

But for the brief period of time in which I lived in ignorance, hanging out with friends, hustling for quarters and bonding over pizza and friendly competition...man, those years were golden.

To this day I eschew competitive gaming-- I'd rather work towards a co-operative goal or PvE with friends/my kids than have it rubbed in my face constantly that the world is full of people who are more exceptional than me.

I read this in the voice of Maester Aemon.

Completely agree now that I not so suddenly have a girlfriend and her 10-year-old boy to think about. It changes things. A lot. And we're not married, and the kid isn't even mine.

But every aspect of my life has changed. All of my priorities have changed. That woman and that kid are all I care about after I leave work. And when I leave work, I fucking leave it.

I agree with what you said. Everyone needs to accept who and where they are. But I know this: I'm no longer interested in the gigs that take me away from my family. Not my girlfriend or her son, not my dad or mom, or my brothers either.

I've done my time with that pretentious horseshit. I'll take a job real close to the people who spent their lives loving me and give it back now.

Different people will feel different ways. For sure.

Here is a side project for 2018 for you: Be nicer to other people.

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