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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

A bad pattern I’ve been trying to sort out for myself lately is that I pick projects that sound like I would be good at and that could be interesting instead of picking projects that look like ones I actually feel nostalgia for.

It’s like I’m always chasing after the Bad Boys or something.

Two of the biggest nostalgia experiences have been embedded or mobile projects. I got out when it became clear that the people who run the credit cards make all the money and treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit). I told a friend at the time that AT&T is a racket for converting VC dollars into free QA.

Objectively, how are things in mobile now? Should I have ended my self-imposed exile ages ago? Are they just desktop apps with limited pixels, or is there still skill involved with squeezing things into small spaces?

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I had a simple Radio Shack RC car when I was young. When it started to wear out, I took it apart, hoping I would be able to improve it. It turned out to be nearly pure analog circuitry, and I didn't know where to learn more about analog circuits, so that was the end of that.

When I grew up, I got my kids similar cheap RC cars, but when they broke, this time I replaced their circuitry with ESP8266 D1 minis with the D1 motor shield. I 3D printed new shells, added lights, and used PWM frequency variation to play music through the motor windings. I made a simple app that controls the cars over wi-fi. My kids loved them much more than the original.

It didn't take much effort because the tools are all much easier to use today, but I'm rather proud of my little accomplishment. I turned a mildly sad childhood event into something really fun for my kids. I turned the nostalgia up to 11. ;-)

So if you're looking for some way to do something nostalgic and fun, find a way to make something you've always wanted to make, then give it away. The project isn't really complete until someone else enjoys it.

Mobile development still has some unfortunate features, like Apple's App Store guidelines limiting the types of apps you're allowed to distribute there, and ever-changing requirements that mean that apps that don't get updated for newer OS releases (even if the app is otherwise fine) get removed from the app store.

Even with that, mobile is where all the users are nowadays. Traditional desktop/laptop computing is not a growth market. If you want to build software that lots of people will use you want to build it for mobile platforms. Smartphones are also ridiculously overpowered at this point, so you do have the resources to make pretty compelling experiences unlike with what you'd think of as a traditional embedded system.

I too am nostalgic for the early days of mobile when system resources and screen size were both scarce. It required creative solutions. It was fun. Nowadays with larger screens and phones that are as fast as your laptop, mobile apps share more in common with desktop apps than not.

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