Ask HN: What do you do when have free time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do when have free time?

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I am a web developer, and usually, have for 3 - 4 hours free when back from the office. I always want to learn or make something. Can you show me something?

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I have been doing the same during the last 20 years approximately, getting home and:

- Browse internet (Reddit, hacker news, or whatever site that was popular back then) - Gaming - Learning some IT stuff, either related to my job or not - Coding

Few months ago, I have started to get out of the screen and doing something else because that way of living was literally killing me. I got extremely lazy, a bit overweight, atrophied muscles, back starting to bend, procrastinating more often, having brain fog more often, not having enough social life, losing communication skills because of not having contact with other humans.

I started running, going to the gym, doing weights, pinging friends to go visit them, reading books not related with IT, going to organized running events during weekends, cooking, and other activities, going to smoke outside the house/hotel and definitely allocating some time for my old past-times(internet, gaming, coding, learning). This has completely changed my life:

- I feel more energetic, sleep better and wake up fresher. - I reached my ideal weight - I am getting my muscles toned and increased flexibility - I have have found joy on doing things not attached to a keyboard and mouse (like cooking) - I have improved the relationship with my friends. - And in general I am happier than before.

I do not know how old are you, or if your question was intended to look for fancy things to do in your free time, but, I can tell you honestly:

Please, DO NOT stay sit in a chair after work in an isolated environment for the next years to come. Hit the gym, reconnect with friends, look for alternative hobbies, and reduce the time dedicated to the screen. Your 20-years older self will thank you.

The only thing I have not been able to achieve is stop smoking. Many tries, no success, but I hope I will achieve this by the end of the year.

Please do tell again if it sticks after a few months. Honeymoon is a thing with a major lifestyle change.

The fact that sport can enrich your life and that it is good for your health is known by most of us. Often we don't attach importance to this.

Thanks for your advice!! Every item you listed that is a problem of mine. Maybe true, I should change myself.

Glad to hear you think it is useful advice.

I wrote that wishing I could have read something similar myself long ago.

In the same line, I was constantly living in my head, which is something I guess happens quite often to everybody. "Tomorrow I will start doing this", "By the end of this month I will achieve this", and these kind of thoughts. If you are thinking about changing something all the time, do not bother, it will not happen.

My plan to get out of this destructive loop was a bit extreme, but it worked, so I share it with you as well:

- I took 2 months holiday (I run my own business so it have some impact but I managed it well)

- I traveled abroad, in my case to Thailand.

- I spent the first weeks indulging myself with fancy eating, going parties, relaxing in pool and beaches, Tindering around, etc...

- Then I booked 2 weeks in a Muai Thai gym camp in the northern region, far from the civilization.

- I spent that time just doing hardcore exercise, eating the camp food (healthy plan), no smoking, no party, no drinking and going to sleep at 9 PM.

- After this I kept going to the gym and adjusting to my new way of living, and so far, everything is working out.

I very want (love) to exercise. 7 yrs ago I got a traffic accident, and I'm using a prosthetic leg, so I very lazy to do exercise. I think that my mistake :(

So sorry to hear about your accident. I was very close to having an amputation years ago but was able to make a recovery thankfully. Yesterday I heard a podcast by

https://www.instagram.com/kirstie_ennis/?hl=en

this episode and the next one (199/200) from jocko podcast discuss veterans with amputations and is inspiring stuff!

https://jockopodcast.com/

I have two kids, work from home. Mornings are a battle to get the older one ready for kindergarten and driving her there, then going home to work. Picking her up in the afternoon, finishing work, eating supper, playing etc with the kids and sleep. Rinse and repeat.

I can't find time for any hobbies, I've lost all my friends. Life has become an ever-shrinking circle of family tedium.

So if you have the opportunity, don't squander it. Use your free time to find things that are meaningful to you. Friends. Hobbies and things to learn.

Kids will grow up and become increasingly more self-sufficient.

Hold on that thought until it becomes your reality. And it will.

Hey, I'm sorry this is where you're at, I hope it gets better for you.

I've picked up learning Portuguese and it's really fun. Choose a language you're interested in and start on Duolingo (sometimes doing the reverse tree can be an interesting challenge as well when you're done with the standard one). Create a Google doc with words and phrases and then automatically make flashcards with them on Quizlet, and then you can learn while on public transport or otherwise need to kill time. When you feel ready, hire some native speakers on Italki to converse with you and help with your conversational skills (or use HelloTalk for free as a language exchange). Download podcasts in that language, consume videos on YouTube, and watch the occasional Netflix show if it's available in the language you chose. Visit the country as often as you can/want!

I’ve been learning about Bonsai from Nigel Saunders on YouTube for a few years now. This spring I finally started trying to do some propagation.

Love it, great fun. The first year is tough though, there’s a lot of days where you’re just watering, no “fun stuff” to do, and everything looks basically the same as last week.

I expect after 12 months or so I’ll have enough plants in vigor to keep busy every week. Until then it’s a bit sporadic.

One of the best pieces of life advice I've seen was from Nigel. In the context of bonsai he said to grow a lot of trees. You prune the bonsai maybe once or twice a year and re-pot every 3 years or so. So maybe an hour of work a year for one tree: that's not a hobby :-)

I've realised this is true for a lot of things. I used to worry that my home made cheese wouldn't turn out. But if it doesn't turn out well, I will need to make it again.... and cheese making is my hobby! What wondrous luck ;-)

WRT the original question, it doesn't matter what you do. If you want it to be your hobby, then do a lot of it and have fun :-)

For sure. I have 150+ plants after six months. I expect to lose half of them by next summer. If I am lucky I will have pruning/repotting work every weekend by then!

Cuttings are great in that respect because you only have to pay for soil! And I stay busy building cheap training boxes from scrap wood.

Learn to make money. There will be a time when you are sick of your co-workers and your boss. Or you just want to spend time with your wife and kids. And you will need money to say "fuck it! I'll take a vacation for the next two years."

Maybe you should switch to a job where your coworkers are your best friends. Then if you're lucky you'll love both your work life and your non-work life.

My jobs in the 90s all involved best friends. Either they became best friends at work or they were best friends before we started. Going to work was mostly a pleasure. It was like hanging out with best friends and building things with them. Sure not everything was flowers and unicorns but even that, doing it together was great.

In the 2000s I haven't had best friends at work and while I've worked on some cool projects it's been a slog.

"making money" sounds pretty generic, do you have any resources?

Are you just taking on part-time contracts, writing ebooks/courses, stock-trading, or something else?

i was wondering the same thing....

If you enjoy learning and creating, get into art. Pick an instrument and join a group of like minded people, or take on visual arts classes like painting, sculpting or photography. The road to mastery is endless so you will have learning opportunities to last you a lifetime. Bonus: you can also meet new people through art!

Also, reading is pretty great to calm your mind after a stressful day at the office.

In an ideal world, I'd work on one of the (excessively many) books or ebooks that I've queued up. In reality, I pick up my phone and refresh HN, play some Tetris, or maybe a training exercise on lichess.

These are the things I do every day and sometimes I feel like I'm a useless :(

I wish I had an answer for you. The closest I have is this: reading on a stationary recumbent bike at a gym seems to work decently for me, as long as the material isn't anything that requires serious focus, or taking notes.

Pick up a physical activity.

I do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) and I liken it to learning how to program. It's got a huge learning curve and you can go months/years feeling like you've learned nothing, but eventually something clicks and you become proficient at certain aspects, all while being clueless around people that are much better/more experienced than you.

While it's a combat sport, I liken to think of it as "playfighting for adults". It's also great to get out of the house/office for a while and to socialise with people outside of your immediate friend/career circle. On the mat your ultimate currency is nothing to do with race, gender, career, or earning potential - all that matters is skill, and that's a great thing.

Finally, for a sport that can be rough, I find it does wonders for my back and hands. Sometimes I feel rough after 8+ hours of typing in a chair, and BJJ seems to make my hands/shoulders/back feel much better.

Martial arts. Was a competitive martial artist around 8 years ago, neglected it for a couple of years and practiced just about 3 times per month for the last 6 months (this was the only excercise I got). 2 months ago I joined a Kung Fu Club and started training twice a week, and 1 day I go to the gym and do mostly cardio on the treadmill. I rather practice martial arts because I always get bored at the gym just by lifting weights, so I believe that martial arts are a fun and practical to get your weekly training.

I got to tell you, all the praise that excercise gets is for something, cannot express how better I feel since this new training regime; I feel more focused, with more energy and my ideas are clearer in my head, also my mood stays better over the week. If you're not excercising, PLEASE do it.

Im relearning math. Everything. I went into it earlier in life with a “when am I gonna need this?” attitude. Turns out all the time. Even what Ive refreshed myself on in the last few months has made my job easier and more intuitive. The subject isnt important though. Just learn anything!

That's a good one. I was thinking of this as well. Would you point me towards some good courses or books as a starting point?

Last week I bought a KaiOS device (Nokia 2720 Flip [0]). I'm currently trying to build a simple app for that platform that will hopefully be added to the App Store. The App Store provided on Nokia phones is quite limited, so plenty of opportunities there.

I also advice a friend of mine on building a mobile app with Xamarin for iOS and Android (he's only worked on Python web apps in the past, so for him it's a big change).

Finally I like to play World of Warcraft Classic. I did write an add-on for WoW to teach myself the Lua basics, but will not be continuing work on that. It was a fun learning experience though.

---

[0]: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-2720-flip

Kaios sorely lacks a 2FA app.

That's actually what I'm working on :)

That is great, do let us know once you have it on store! :)

Lots of people here are showing their creations on "Show HN":

https://news.ycombinator.com/show

(which can be accessed via the "show" link at the top of the page)

I'm working on a graph-based Excel that moves away from a Cartesian namespace to a web-based canvas that lets you place a "cell" on the 'easel' by clicking anywhere and typing whatever you want. The parser will try to infer your intent (e.g. "that look like a date," or "John looks like a person," or "this vector of vectors looks like a table.") to help with sorting, filtering and visual distinction.

Spolsky wrote, "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."

Each cell acts like a transverter - a reducing function that supports undo and produces a mutated graph. All values are lazy sequences that materialize on-demand. If you type `=` or `(` it will try to evaluate your expression and offer to spit out lazy values into a new, neighbouring cell.

It's called Hoist for now and I wrote down some of my rationale for why I think it's valuable: https://github.com/theronic/hoist/blob/master/README.md

There are several large ongoing efforts on visual programming interfaces, but most of them try to make the user "program visually". I'm just trying to give you an incremental interface that lets you manipulate connections and query any value with Datalog, including the graph itself.

Nice! Sounds interesting as an ex-excel wizard for billing in large companies. Watch out for spaghetti nodes though. Ue4's blueprint editor turns nodes into octopus monsters with many arms that seek to strangle the programmer. The ability to bring disparate nodes in to a top-down, left-right predictable order is quite useful. The same way we read.

I'm a programmer and used to spend my free time staring at a computer screen (whether working on personal projects, building websites and video games or playing video games) but then I realized this was taking a toll on my social life and both physical and mental health. Now I try to do something completely unrelated to coding (I still enjoy coding and do it occasionally but not nearly as much as before), for example cooking or fixing things or doing any work that is tangible. I play sports and go to the gym. It helps a lot with confidence and your dopamine levels which then motivates you to be more successful at other options things, like coding, or dating or just meeting new people.

In case people are interested in projects I've built, in the early beginning of learning full stack I was over ambitious and wanted to build a website that would help discover quality mobile games. The website is: https://www.playworthy.io/ But the idea never took off. The website is still live but I rarely maintain it because the amount of traffic it gets.

Quantity of upvotes isn't quality though. Can you work in a curation or review aggregation system?

I've been learning blender for the past few weeks and in the future ( maybe in 2 years ) I wanted to create animation films.

I'm learning about systems. I take kind of a humanities approach to it but that makes it fun (at least for me). I write about it here: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/blog/

Recently I've been bouncing from hobby to hobby trying to free my creativity. I bought some nice pencils and a sketch pad and started drawing, I took out a unity learning subscription and started programming VR games, I bought a guitalele to practice guitar without hauling a full size guitar about. And I've been experimenting with live looping in FLStudio with my Akai Mini midi.

What's ruining me though is the amount of time I spend resting, drinking, smoking, or on Reddit. I'm trying to get a fun routine, or switch out the bad habits for good ones, setting myself evening goals.

If you like making things, make things.

Make food and crafts for people. Improve your environment. Improve your town. Improve your self. Make rituals. Do these things until the world is filled with wonder.

If you enjoy writing, write about what you learn. If you enjoy photography, capture it, and show us.

What I do with free time: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1164147316745523200

I work on my JSON/BSON/etc replacement: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding

I've been at it a year and a half so far. Designing something like this is actually very challenging!

And the kicker is that this technology is only a stepping stone towards what I actually want to build :P

I'm studying open-source codebases to learn how others do /approach things; mostly things I've starred on GitHub and learning Tumbuka (a local language in my country).

Where possible, contributing to oss via my "stealth mode" startup: https://github.com/nndi-oss

I have a few things that I have been doing lately in my free time. I am currently working in the cyber security domain but my dream is to be a scientist (Marine Biologist). I have started my degree in Molecular biology as a start. This takes up most of my free time

In addition, I am obsessed with building side projects so I have multiple projects I maintain/work on.

1. Practicing violin (consistently 2 hr a day) 2. Play video games with friends 3. Read books at night 4. Scanning through social media and cooking tutorials when I have some minute-long spare time during the day.

I try to not just do programming; I used to, but despite my mind being satisfied, my mood was constantly low and I felt that my horizon was severely limited.

Spend your free time with your family and learning how to make more money. You won’t regret either (if you balance them).

Here's Jim Pankey's page on YouTube. This guy will teach you how to play BlueGrass Banjo, step by step.

It's great fun, if it's the right thing for you.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJv5sNGAeKx8hce2grI4hhQ

I'm trying to build the fastest compositor for X11/Linux: https://github.com/DelusionalLogic/NeoComp

It's a lot of work. So far I've been at it for 2 years, with the first one being pure refactoring.

First commits seem from 5 years ago. Maybe more than 2 years?

I keep a stack of things to read on a table, usually a mix of popular press, new scientific papers, a text book or two, and the occasional novel. Ideally I spend 2 - 8 hours a week reading things from the stack. I say that is 'ideally' because if I read less than that the stack accumulates :-).

Wow, thank you, at this time I'm reading some book too, but focus on the philosophy and Buddhism

My free time is divided between video games and playing with arduinos and other electronic tinker toys.

I try to go for a walk or swim. While I don't work as a developer, I work with many of them - and during the day we make wonderfully sedentary creatures (save our fingers), so I find that going for a walk tends to help me unwind from my day and be more creative the next.

Practice handstands.

Kid stuff. Beach if possible! Occasionally surf or ski (novice at both). Small bike rides I mean say half hour slow ride. I do some programming I’m currently working on a series of Elm projects. When I say series it might be one every six months - no rush.

Too many things. I tend to avoid my computer when away from the office. I do wood working with hand tools. I'm converting a shipping container into a shed for wood working. I play blues guitar. I build custom computer keyboards. I restore old bicycles.

- basic electrical engineering[0]

- Books about sleep

- the knowledge by dartnell

- composting basics

- took back drumming rudiments (After seeing Chapin/moeller videos again on youtube)

[0] unintended consequence of circuit analysis is that it quickly devolves into topology/graphtheory which makes me spin in full math and get stuck

I have a few projects I jump around when I'm in the mood.

1. web app in elixir/phoenix

2. trade system for stock & time series analysis

3. finance (stocks, bonds, options)

I like having multiple projects because my passion end up drying up for one and I just jump on to another existing project.

Read. In theory, you can learn to make something or use it as form of entertainment or relaxation. From my experience its like cardio, the first 10 minutes are tough to get through until you’re warmed up.

Play Bridge. And make a note of the hands where I could have done better, and revise these later. Unfortunately, I reside in a country where Bridge is not that popular, but Chess enviably is.

To keep sane, I need to keep out from a screen, either playing guitar, going sailing (or work on it which is a massive time sink), freediving or anything fun like kayaking, surfing, ...

I write boardgames and role-playing games: https://space-timewilltell.yoric.xyz/ .

I learn bluegrass guitar licks. Lots of free resources on Youtube.

Investigate modern encryption and how it affects quantum computing and other modern tech issues. I also enjoy reading Cold War era books

Work on my personnal computer project. I develop a 3D game in java using a custom made 3D engine.

Anything you can share?

I’ve been teaching myself to weld.

+1, a great skill to have. You can make so many things.

I workout. Health is important.

100% this.

I luckily dodged a burnout just in time. Symptoms were insomnia, thinking I wasn’t good enough and bursts of anger.

My problem was thinking about work and getting better at my craft all the time. I didn’t take time for myself, didn’t exercise and had a bad diet.

But it’s hard to convince someone to take care of themselves. Sometimes you have to hit the ground.

I try to play guitar as much as possible.

Carpentry. I hack up bits of wood :-)

Stock Trading.

Lurk HN? :)

Social media. simple just likenow!

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