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Comment by ajxs | Hacker News Reader

I definitely identify with the author. A big mistake I made in the past was to assume that other software engineers are equally enthusiastic about these kind of projects, or the least bit impressed by them. I was asked for a job interview to prepare presentations on two projects I was particularly proud of. I chose a hobby Operating System kernel I'd developed from the ground up, and a fully-functional MIPS assembler I had written. The interviewers (senior developers within the company) really just did not get it. Responding with questions such as: "Is this going to make you any money?", and "When do you expect this to be complete?". They really couldn't understand my motivations. I did these projects for no other reason than that I love programming, and I have never stopped loving learning about it. I have never needed to consider, or justify to myself why I did these things. I do them because I enjoy what I do.

I ended up pivoting to discuss some comparatively banal professional project migrating a mid-sized financial product to a new tech-stack, which managed to captivate their attention. I found this experience extremely disheartening, however important a lesson it was to learn. I don't think it's changed my outlook in any way though, admittedly. I still work on the same kinds of projects, and I still think the best developers are the ones who do work on toy projects for their own enjoyment.

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I strongly relate. I spent a couple of weekends working on some procedural art [0] and was pretty happy with the end result. When I showed it to some of my co-workers / manager, they were baffled. "Uhh.. OK. Why did you make this?"

[0] https://andersource.dev/2020/10/10/procedural-butterfly.html

This is a nice butterfly.

How was it made?

Thanks!

First I'm generating the general geometry of the wings - the most basic shape is a "teardrop" / half of the infinity symbol (see this[0]). Then they are scaled and rotated randomly (within a range to match the other parts of the wings), and further perturbed to make the shape more random. Then I'm drawing lines from the "tip" of the teardrop to the edges and using them to color the segments. The final result is rendered with Three.js[1].

Obviously this is a very succinct explanation, it took me quite some work. You're welcome to look at the code[2], though it's quite messy :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemniscate_of_Gerono

[1] https://threejs.org/

[2] https://github.com/andersource/andersource.github.io/blob/ma...

That's quite a lot of code! I wasn't expecting to see a linear interpellation function, but that would explain how smooth it looks.

I moved my cursor pointer around the screen and hoped it would follow.

That's a great idea!

These are beautiful! And I second the other comment asking how it works. A good candidate for a blog post if you're looking for a more appreciative audience than your coworkers.

Thank you, I thought of writing one, this might give me the motivation to finally do it!

That's very cool! I should probably have added to the original comment that in the cases where it's been my role to interview potential candidates for a position, these kind of projects are the first thing I look for. I'd much rather work with people who are fundamentally passionate about what they do.

Thanks, and that's great! Due to experiences like the above I would probably not even think of bringing this up in a regular interview, unless I get the vibe that the interviewer might actually find it interesting for its own sake (which isn't that easy - turns out I have a terrible intuition for which people would appreciate something like that).

Nice! Have you considered adding flocking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids) with lots of them flying around? For a "useless stuff" project, I coded this for bats (all the same model) flying around. It's really fun to play with the flocking parameters to make them behave like bees, fish, birds etc. and it's not much more code than a regular particle system.

Thanks! And that's really cool, added to the TODO list!

This is really cool! I love things like this, they make the world more interesting.

Sometimes I post things on Show HN that have people seemingly baffled. I like to retort that I made them because I wanted to. It's what I chose to do. I enjoyed doing it. People don't seem to think that's good enough. I think to a large extent coding can be like making art. You don't have to explain what you're doing. You can do it because it satisfies you. Not every "coding product" has to be an actual product. I think engineers in general would do well to learn to appreciate things from an artistic perspective and be comfortable with ambiguity in purpose and meaning, and even if there was a clear purpose, they don't have to know it to appreciate the creation. I know it's tricky, because engineering is by necessity such a logical, needs-clear-definitions type of undertaking, but there's also so much creativity that happens in the space as well. I think the "space as a whole" is lessened when people only what to judge code products in a utilitarian or easily understandable sense. Sometimes you just make things because you can, because you choose to, or because you want to. And that's cool, equally (or more) valid and can be very special and powerful. Practically for some people it might even be a good antidote to the common trope of "culture / industry malaise or disillusionment", while at the same time helping people learn and improve their skills doing something they like. Ultimately, everyone's different, and I get if some people want to factor all the work they do, including learning, from a "how will I bank this?" perspective, and that's cool, but I just think there's room for more views, and they should be appreciated, and certainly not shunned. I think our industry is lessened when people shun people making stuff for their own reasons. I really like doing this, and I think you should try it to, if you're on the fence! :P ;) xx

> I think to a large extent coding can be like making art.

That resonates very strongly with me.

> I enjoyed doing it. People don't seem to think that's good enough.

Yeah, I've found that a lot of times when you want to show something you've made to someone, they'll automatically expect it to be useful and judge it from that perspective. Perhaps that would be different if we could frame it in a way that from the beginning helps align expectations?

> Perhaps that would be different if we could frame it in a way that from the beginning helps align expectations?

It might, but I just want to put it out there sometimes. I don't want to have to explain it, or limit its appreciation to whatever I say it is. I like to leave it open for people to interpret. Sure, when you go to a gallery, sometimes there's a little card that "explains" the art work. But sometimes not. I guess I like the freedom of just creating things and letting people interpret them. I don't want to do that all the time, explain it, but I do it sometimes. So I suppose I'm pushing the task onto the consumers of the work to work out what it means for them, rather than me to explain it. And seeing well are people going to be open to that or not. Whatever their reaction, it's okay either way. I just want the freedom myself to explain it when I want and not when I want, but on a basic level both are equally valid.

I'm not in charge of hiring people but I think your project is awesome.

I do DFIR though and from time to time I help with interviewing potential security analysts. If someone has the skillset needed for the job and on top of that they are so passionate about technology that they work on even tangentially related projects outside of work its largely regarded as an excellent indicator that they'll be a good hire. Obviously that's not the only type of good hire but its one of them.

If I was the person you responded to afterwards I would have come to the conclusion that the interviewers were genuinely stupid people. Even if you don't know anything about OS development you should understand as a person that works with computers or a recruiter that hires for the industry that its a non-trivial project.

This is beautiful, I really don't understand people who don't see the value in creating beautiful or interesting things.

I can understand not wanting to do it, it takes a fair bit of time and energy that only comes with a fair bit of passion on the part of the creator, but not understanding why people would just want to make things? That's fairly alien to me =)...

I'd echo seanwilson and ask that you look at flocking, but also more general boid behaviours[0], small herds of these butterflies flying together in a space would look very cool =)...

- [0]: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Thanks so much! Yeah that idea is really itchy now :)

I guess some people don't see (at least immediately) the artistic value in such things, and then it seems rather pointless.

It's a little hard to tell because the butterflies are flapping and rotating, but I think your algorithm is sometimes generating dead butterflies.

https://emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

I feel changes a lot between locations (“scenes”). Back when I lived in Berlin, we had entire meetups dedicated to talk about _useless but cool projects_. Moved to the Bay Area, and I could never find anything remotely similar. Maybe they exist, I just couldn’t find one.

I also experienced the same interviewing experience you had, many times: my “talk about something interesting you made” answer used to be “I made a twitter bot that makes poetry with ML and I spent months training it” - it always got radically different reactions, from blank stares to “why didn’t you use those to mine bitcoin?”

http://www.stupidhackathon.com/

I feel changes a lot between locations

A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions, etc.

Meetups like the West Coast Computer Faire, little shops like Weird Stuff, amateur radio "hamfests", astronomy clubs, and so on were everywhere. Programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules. Tech companies were rounding errors compared to, say, car companies.

But the intellectual fashion enforcers with wealth and power that tech companies are now, with tools to make society submit to their will are not the culture we were. Like Wall Street before them, they have bigger plans than ordinary, little people with their quaint hobbies. So even though we pocket protector and slide rule types still exist and can form a quorum online, the in-person meetings mostly (not entirely but mostly) vanished back in the dot-com mania.

Bizarre this was downvoted.

There are plenty of people from both groups in their comment who participate in HN. It's not too surprising, he was not too kind.

It's the tyranny of the internet, the bigger a group of people the harder it is to keep everyone happy and in agreeance, and not tread on any toes. Disagreement isn't the end of the world though.

Related is the common misconception that the well-known tech companies, corporations and startups alike, are part of that same "nerd" scene you mention. They aren't. They're just another flavor of business, and the people running them are just businessmen.

That's almost like making a website for people who dream about making big money managing an IT company, and calling it "hacker news".

> A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions, etc.

Dammit. So this is not something I merely suspected but is really true. I grew up around the year 2000 and programming was all I could think about, I read about people/meetups you describe and was eager to be a part of them.

By the time I grew up, attended university and started a job, things seemed very different. The stuff that got me excited about programming are now considered "boring" or "legacy".

Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing and do what is considered amazing now (AI etc) even though you don't find it fun :/

> Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing

Absolutely not. All these things people are talking about in this thread are still out there, you just have to keep looking. Posts show up on HN occasionally that hint at it, but one of my favorite places to go browse when I need a hit of that passion project ecosystem is hackaday.com.

There are so many people out there doing cool stuff just to do it, especially given the fact that everything is literally orders of magnitude more accessible than it was even 10 years ago when you consider resources like YouTube, and the race to the bottom on cost of things like Arduinos, 3D printing, etc.

If this does circle back to finding a job, then that's a matter of finding the right fits. I got my first job out of college writing iOS apps for motorcoach bus schedules by showing the company a game I released on the app store, and my most recent position for a Senior iOS dev (which has translated to a firmware position), I spent most of my interview talking about my homebrew synth project: https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI

There are people out there who will be interested, and they also happen to be people who hire people! I show my coworkers my side projects all the time, sometimes they're somewhat relevant to what we do, sometimes they don't relate at all.

I stayed all my life at the same location, and I noticed the change between the times, too.

My guess is that this is because of different motivations people had to learn computer programming. Did you learn programming because making simple programs in Basic was irresistibly fascinating? Or did you learn programming because people told you that this was how you could make a lot of money? Of course the former type of software developer is more likely to play with "useless" (i.e. not immediately profitable) stuff than the latter.

When I was a kid, personal computers existed, but they were mere toys. It was not obvious that something like today's IT industry will exist one day. Therefore, only nerds played with personal computers. And the first IT companies were full of nerds, because those were the only people who knew how to write code.

When it became obvious that IT jobs are well paid and the demand for programmers is large, people motivated mostly by money started studying computer science, too. These days they probably are a majority at most workplaces.

Nerds had their moment in the spotlight, now they are being displaced by normies. Being fascinated by tech for tech's sake is uncool again. It is cool to be fascinated by tech for money's sake, though.

By firing James Damore, even Google made it official that people on the autistic spectrum are no longer welcome.

I really feel this. At some point, all those hobbies became metrics to optimize for monetary gain, things to put on a cv. Somehow that seems to have changed everything.

There is this modern phylosopher, Byung-Chul Han[0], who talks about this and similar stuff on his essays and books. You could read him on a weekend, his books are short. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han

In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff.

Those things are exciting to me. But I notice my work colleagues, especially the ones from newer generations and those working more on high level stuffs, are rarely interested in these computational/communication device hobby thingies at the fundamental levels. They are more interested in what to make out of them rather than what are they made of.

I always found myself feeling like a fake...

No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled.

These things are exciting to me

And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them.

I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!

Ok wow, I feel like this really describes me, I'm playing Kerbal Space Program Multiplayer and one of my friends has completed the game so knows how to do everything and I'm still trying to do each bit that's already been done.

It's very much, "look I get that we've done it, but I want to know how to do it", how else am I going to learn?

I never really got into ham, I should see if there's anything locally...

I had the same experience when I moved back to the Bay Area. I made a serious effort to find meetups and connect with hacker spaces, etc. Most of them were veiled product pitches or fishing for developers to hire. Also, some of the meetups had people obviously looking for ideas to take. Really turned off by all of it and quit going out. When even TechShop went bankrupt I realized that the "scene" was long gone.

All the eccentrics and wizards seem to be gone. It's all just crass transactional factory workers. Last contract I was surrounded by people who talked about the entire line of Audi and BMW sedans, but had zero interest in any ideas.

A good portion of the population would have no idea whatsoever to do with themselves if money ever becomes unnecessary for society to function. This is why so many people who suddenly become rich are prone to drug abuse and increased suicide risk. Some people are only able to see what they were taught.

> "Is this going to make you any money?"

Well, statistically speaking, neither will the commercial project, no matter how useful.

It's too bad interesting but ultimately useless projects hold so little weight in interviews. But I don't know if it's clear cut that they will be less profitable than commercial projects, which fail more often than not. Expanding your skillset may be more profitable in the end.

I've been thinking of pivoting to useless myself. With projects of some commercial potential I have to have a novelty budget, usually ending up with Node.js and React because as boring as the stack is you can always Google a problem and have the solution handed to you on a platter. But so far none of them have made me any money. They have given me some business experience, though, but I get even more pushback from highlighting or trying to apply that in my day job. They want a good little worker bee, not someone who will be gunning for any business development positions.

That's a really disappointing reaction you got. If I was interviewing someone who described having implemented a kernel or an assembler for fun I would be thrilled!

Right!

If GP is looking for a job then for the love of god, please email gianni at my-hn-user-name dot co dot uk :)

You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job?

A very common topic about programming is how useless are most whiteboard job interviews, as they challenge the interviewees on something they will never use in the job.

Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them.

In regards to the GP story, I'm also saddened that the interviewers didn't show interest for those projects. Kernel development indicates a high aptitude for many kinds of unrelated programming jobs, but not for most of them. Especially "enterprise" jobs. For the purposes of the interview the "banal professional project" is likely the relevant one.

If anything, having the senior developers show no interest is a good thing, and indicates that even if the candidate gets the job he probably won't enjoy his time at the company.

I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is.

Keeping with the example of creating an OS kernel, foundational programming skills translate across everything. So kernel development shouldn't be a negative signal in regards to programming ability.

In regards to kernel development itself, I think it's probably very valuable experience not because of the programming but because of the perspective the person has gained. I have no experience with kernel development, but I would hazard that you need a very different mindset and approach compared to application development.

I think the perspective you gain from being forced to adopt a different mindset and approach is massively undervalued by most people because it's not immediately obvious how that experience is useful or directly applicable.

> I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is.

I'd go as far as saying people who've never done this level of hobby work don't understand the amount and breadth of experience and knowledge one gains this way.

A OS kernel or an assembler for a niche architecture aren't something you just do like another work task. It's not something you half-ass under deadline pressure by gluing together some third party libraries, StackOverflow tips and hastly skimmed documentation. Your boss would never agree to pay you for the amount of time and care that's involved in hobby projects like these. A month of such a project will teach you more about computing than a year on the job[0].

Unfortunately, this kind of experience is hard to keep track of and neatly summarize on your CV. If you tried, you'd end up with a page or three extra, and people would think you're just keyword stuffing, and doing it badly - referencing niche, unmarketable technologies, seemingly related to nothing[1]. These skills are important and very useful, but they don't look like it until you need them[1], and you're unlikely to pick them up on the job, unless there's already someone who had them before joining the company, and is now teaching others. There just isn't time. Taking care, or spending time sharpening the saw[2], is considered time not spent delivering business value.

Since most software companies aren't really training their workforce much, it's kind of dumb to ignore off-work experience - after all, if your company isn't giving people time to skill up, why assume previous companies on a candidate's CV were different?

[0] - It might not teach you how to work in a team setting, though. That's what jobs are good at. That, and teaching you what "good enough" is.

[1] - Like, I wouldn't put "Event Tracing for Windows" as a qualification on my resume, even though me being familiar with it saved the company a lot of money they'd otherwise spend on people continuing to fruitlessly chase a heisenbug.

[2] - Or, God forbid, writing tools for yourself.

Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job.

For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might only want to care how much professional experience they have shooting commercials.

Sure, these experiences in "unrelated" work might show qualities that could be applied to this job. But you aint paid for your broad and wide interests in the topic - you are paid on being able to implement some work/feature that somebody else told you to do. And in fact, if you require intrinsic motivation to actually perform well, you might end up being a liability to the team, rather than an asset - after all, if the work is boring, and you lack intrinsic motivation for it, you might slack off, or over-engineer it to make the work more interesting to you. Or you might end up being a difficult person to work with for other team members because you sit so far above them intellectually.

The analogy here doesn't make sense. It'd be more like the actor mentioning that he doesn't have any experience doing commercial work, but he has acted in a theatrical production before (suggesting that he's adaptable and willing to do more than just one kind of acting job).

That's literally what happens for most business or leadership interviews. The only common thread for most of them is that they ran a company. They may know nothing about the market, the customer, the product or anything else related to the business, it may even have failed miserably, but because they have an MBA and hired a handful of people they're somehow competent for the job.

How about we hold those people accountable to the same standards? Hell, most of your politicians are that way.

You have dentists commenting on how pandemic response should be.

For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature.

> Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job.

Are you f'in kidding me? Either we hold the other useless part of society to the same standards we hold ourselves accountable to or we give each other a break.

EDIT: and for all the ignorant folks thinking Trumps schoolyard bully rhetoric did anything but empower the CCP keep in mind that Chinas nickname for Trump is "Chuan Jian Guo". Trump the nation builder(guess who's nation they are talking about). And as much as I disliked Obama and his TPP, it was the answer to the new silk road. Trump basically handed China the entirety of Asias future on a silver platter, and in return the US got what? 10 billion in trade deficit balances? Completely laughable. Or the new Blue Dot(completely fitting name by the way)?

https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from...

Blue Dot is described, officially, as promoting global, multi-stakeholder “sustainable infrastructure development in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.”

It is a joint project of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

Now compare it with what just happened this same week at the inauguration of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai.

As Xi stressed: “To date, China has signed 197 documents on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30 international organizations.”

It would be weird if you brought up your community theater role at a commercial audition and their question was "Is this going to make you any money?"

Even if they don't consider community theater roles to be relevant experience, a casting director/interviewer shouldn't be caught off guard by them.

> For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might only want to care how much professional experience they have shooting commercials.

Does it work like this? I guess it depends on the point in actor's career. If they're 10+ years into commercial acting, then community theare might not be relevant, but at the start of one's career, it seems to me to be highly relevant. At the very least, it demonstrates the person knows the basics of acting, can follow the script, and has experience dealing with the support structure (director, sound/lighting technicians, etc.). This isn't fundamentally different from what they'll face when shooting a commercial.

Also: at least over here in Poland, most film actors come from classical theatre background, they study in theatrical schools. Any kind of theatrical background is highly relevant.

Wow. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

If an interviewee has a pet operating system they've developed they can probably figure out your CRUD app.

Whether a kernel hobbyist will want to work on your CRUD app is another thing.

Sometimes that kernel hoobyist will just want to afford food and rent.

> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them.

Kernel development involves reading vague documentation (that might be wrong) and figuring out how to make things work with not always useful or immediate feedback. And reading other people's similar code to check for clues.

If that's not relevant to day to day development, I've been working at the wrong places. Yes, you don't do a whole lot of page tables day to day; but ocassionally you might need to make something work better or faster, and having deep knowledge of how you might put something like that together will help a lot as you dive into the murky depths of whatever actual OS you work with. Or you could open a support ticket with your vendor, I dunno, people always say that's an option, but I've never seen it happen, and it takes longer to make a clean example program to share outside the company than it does to dig in and fix the problem.

> You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job?

At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where I had a high influence on hiring: yes absolutely unless someone more qualified with the same excitement came around (aka Rob Pike walks in).

At Google interviewing is complicated. There is a lot on the Google careers site about this if you're interested. If you brought this up while doing team matching it will make people's eyes light up. My TL liked that I was doing game dev, R&D, and OS dev for fun and I think it's a large part of why I was chosen for my team.

> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them.

This is true. I'd counter that though by saying that I don't think there's any other project that's taught me more about the nature of what we do as programmers than Operating-System development, even just the little I've done. In order to build even the most basic, non-functional toy kernels you need to gather a comprehensive, holistic view of how compilers, operating systems, and computer hardware interact.

Kernel development would be a stupid thing to put in your requirements list as it would generate too many false negatives, but it should definitely be a nice bonus for any candidate since it demonstrates a fairly high basic level of competence across the board.

Nobody's complaining about whiteboard coding challenges because people who ace them suck at writing code. It's because a far greater number of perfectly competent programmers will fail any given challenge of that type above trivial complexity.

> because people who ace them suck at writing code

Is there such a high correlation? I used to do a lot of hackerrank-style problems for fun, a few years ago. If I had to evaluate my ability to write code back then: pretty crappy.

I was good at writing functions, I was bad at writing programs.

I think their point is, there's just so many bad candidates that even among those that pass whiteboard coding challenges, most can't code - but it increases the ratio of good to bad coders in the pool, so in lieu of a better option[0], it's still used.

[0] - There are plenty of better options, but they tend to not scale - so they cost more, and companies avoid them.

No, that's not my point and it's extreme arrogance on your part to assume that coding is some sort of arcane art only accessible to a select few. Programming is a skill like any other, you develop it with experience. DS&A screening simply selects for people with a decent understanding of the fundamentals, even though it has a very high false negative rate.

You are probably more easily taught how to write good programs because

a) your understanding of the basics is solid;

b) let's face it, these brain teasers are often proxies for intelligence testing.

If they have a glut of candidates for every position, whiteboarding data structures and algorithms makes for a decent filter.

I would ask questions about it.

1. MIPS, eh? Say, does your assembler automatically fill branch delay slots, or is that manual? Does it just fill them with noops, or does it move instructions from the branch target?

2. Do you have all the pseudo-ops, so that a move doesn't have to be expressed as add dest, src, 0 type of thing?

3. Is your assembler syntax compatible with other assemblers? Is the object format?

4. Is there a regression test suite?

An important lesson for me was that doing side projects during my free time didn't make me a better developer at work. Writing a video game or even a webapp without the constraints of working on a team and having business needs that you don't get to choose. Partitioning "work programming" and "home programming" as two separate skills in my mind has been very useful.

My experience had been the opposite. Most techniques, patterns and tricks I learned in pet projects improved my work code. Of course, this is only work's code part, other business stuff like meetings, constraints, etc. didn't get affected so much.

Yeah that's what they're saying I think. Programming outside works helps your programming inside work sure. But for many (most?), programming ability isn't the limiting factor on how effective you are as a _developer_ at work.

Which is something I consider a big scam pulled on the people entering this workforce. You expect to be using your brain to build great, useful things - but in practice, you're expected to be a people person collaborating on doing mostly crap job under tight deadline pressure. No surprise burnout is a problem in this industry.

I mean spread awareness but that's pretty much every job. I've done a lot of kinds of work in my life but this is pretty much the easiest. At least we're paid well and respected. All the other kinds of work were just as hard under as much or more pressure and also for poverty wages. I'll stick with this one lol.

You're absolutely right. We have it quite good, all things considered. It's not like I'd have chosen another career if someone told me how the real world works up front - but it would've saved me a few years of pain due to mismatched expectations.

I was thinking about this recently. Loving to code and getting better at designing and implementing code only goes so far in the industry. To really "level up" you have to learn a whole bunch of other things related to project management, communications, and politics.

I use fun side projects to really level up my software design skills because I can take on bigger tasks and have total freedom to experiment with different designs. I don't think I'd be the programmer I am today without all the side projects I've done over the last 20 years. On the other hand, work has taught me how to work on a team, how to communicate well, how to make political trade-offs, and more.

Thanks: I'm now changing my interview process. If the company doesn't "get it", if they don't understand why _having fun programming_ doesn't make me a better programmer, it's time to leave.

A hobby OS kernel sounds effing amazing and super cool. I've also written an assembler and interpreter (8051 variant), which was mind-bending in a great way. Thanks for posting!

I don't know, if I were in a position of hiring programmers I'd be a little suspicious of how much they do it for fun. I don't want people who base their choices of language, libraries, frameworks or whatever at work on what is fun or interesting to them. I think I'd want to see them have fun creating something for which programming was a means to an ends more than the fun part itself.

Sounds like a tell-tale sign of a work environment in which genuine enthusiasm is not a survival trait :)

It's just a different type of enthusiasm. Some places need/want people really enthused for computer science. Other places want people really enthused for whatever domain they are in. Other places want people really enthused for solving customers pain. Other places want people really enthused for a cause. Being enthused for x when a company wants enthusiasm for y just makes it a bad fit. It doesn't make either party wrong/bad/whatever.

I wasn't trying to be judgemental. It could be, for very valid reasons, that genuine enthusiasm for programming just isn't valued or is viewed indifferently at that place rather than necessarily being something that is either going be crushed out of you or else you'll leave or be pushed out...

Edit: grammar.

Genuine enthusiasm is lethal in any work environment. IT is considered a cost center and people who actually care keep asking for things which cost more money or overcomplicate a manager's work day.

I've found it is cultural and more nuanced. IT can mean a lot of things too, many of which are not related to writing software. And if internally developed software is not adding a competitive advantage, should it really be internally developed?

If genuine enthusiasm really is lethal, it sounds like a toxic work environment.

Sadly, some recruiters are looking for a cog to fill a specific hole, and they do not want someone more experienced or better than what they're looking for (ie. they dont want the Einstein, they just want a math teacher). The salary would also reflect that they are specifically looking for a cog. It's best that you didn't get that position.

I disagree - they didn't ask GP because they wanted to gauge their interest in programing - they asked that question because they wanted to figure out what kind of colleague they would be, and if their experiences would mark them as more suitable for role compared to other candidates. GP's answer was probably from the left field (for them) - put yourself in their shoes: how would you gain insight into gauging their suitability for "cog" work based on completely unrelated hobbies?

Always keep this in mind at the back of your mind when interviewing - your answers have to relate to the job you're interviewing for in some shape or form, hopefully in a good way. I'm guessing the interview wasn't at a kernel, embedded devices or compiler companies - those would have dug into GP's projects in detail, with enthusiasm. GP would still be cog there, obviously.

> put yourself in their shoes: how would you gain insight into gauging their suitability for "cog" work based on completely unrelated hobbies?

This is the core disagreement though: to 'ajxs, me, and many other commenters here, these aren't unrelated hobbies. Software engineering can't be neatly demarked along the lines of programming languages or frameworks. These are just the tip of an iceberg (and most of them are just flavors of the same thing, solving the same underlying problems).

You don't just write a OS kernel and become experienced in kernel development. These kinds of projects, done on the side, with no deadline pressure forcing you to do a half-assed, minimum-effort job, allow you to gain more generalized, holistic understanding, that's very much transferable into just about any kind of programming job you could do.

> your answers have to relate to the job you're interviewing for in some shape or form, hopefully in a good way

That's a very good point. Myself, when talking about my seemingly unrelated side projects, I consider it my responsibility to show how they connect to their domain and skills they look for.

There's a lot of truth in this comment. Being able to gauge the interest of the people you're presenting to, and adjusting accordingly, is obviously going to benefit you in any situation too. It's a good idea to focus on keeping things relevant. In my defense, in this case the instructions were very open ended. They wanted projects I was particularly proud of, and left the scope very wide.

Regarding gauging my suitability for "cog" work: Without wanting to sound arrogant, I don't think it's really that remarkable a feat to memorise the semantics of modern enterprise tools (maybe only a great feat of patience). I can't imagine why anyone would want to hear about all the ORMs I've used, or what Java/Python/Node/<insert tech here> libraries I've used over the years. That stuff is already in my resume. I think it's probably a better wager to risk boring the person looking to hear all about which new Java features you've used, rather than to risk boring the interviewer looking for genuinely interesting passion projects.

> Regarding gauging my suitability for "cog" work: Without wanting to sound arrogant, I don't think it's really that remarkable a feat to memorise the semantics of modern enterprise tools

That is not arrogant at all. However, I think there is room for pride in enterprise projects beyond memorizing specific libs. You can be proud of turning out a solution under pressure, or solving a seemingly-intractable problem creatively, or even a technically simple solution that improved your/user's lives. One of the most high-impact things I've done in my career was to implement a CSV export feature in an afternoon, without being prompted, saving my colleagues many hours of work per week - they were delighted and I'm yet to tip that.

Interviewers are not always looking to be dazzled by technical brilliance (which is a plus), but you can show many other attributes: grit, patience, creativity, curiosity. I think your side-projects exhibit all 4 attributes, but interviewers are fallible, and it's your role to figure out which attributes are desirable for the role and weave them into your answers.

I've found the same thing. I love working on projects in my spare time, a lot of them completely pointless, but fun. I've seen the reactions you describe and it feels like talking to an alien.

I've learned as well that not everyone enjoys working on code in their spare time, or if they think they might enjoy it, they just don't have the motivation to begin. On the flip side, when I do bring up a project I'm working on and see someone's face light up and they describe something they're working on, I feel an instant connection.

> The interviewers

Wow, they are seriously missing a beat. If someone is making useless stuff, it shows they are passionate, which is hugely valuable because people will work hard and make great code because they enjoy themselves.

Maybe I've just got lucky but here in the UK whenever my passion has bled through in an interview it's been recognised and I've got an offer.

I'm currently one of those interviewers and we always ask about fun projects like these. We do that especially since that shows that they're not doing the job only for money, but also because they're passionate about developing software. This helps on multiple levels. For starters, if you focus on one task for too long, that may result in you having a too narrow view on that problem. While doing a fun project on the evening your mind wanders and sometimes suddenly you get an idea to approach that pesky work problem in a totally different way, even though you were thinking about something totally different. Or when you return to your specific work task you can just look at it from a fresh perspective. Or you get a new work-related task and suddenly think "Oh, I could just use part of my [Bobble-Head simulation] algorithm here and this could save me a few hours." If someone says that everything you are doing has to have a specific goal other than just "for the fun of it", I wouldn't want to work with them.

Folks with a deep interest to investigate complex systems in their spare time are unusual -- curious, inventive, and driven. They seek epiphanies about how the world works and are and willing to dig deep to learn about it.

People of this type are displaying the rarest part of the 20,000 hours of practice that's most essential to achieving greatness -- they're pushing themselves to exceed their limits to explore the unknown -- to get better and see farther. And they're willing to try and fail. They're the inventors, the disruptors, the source of all creative change in the world.

I suspect most employers won't welcome that attitude. Like most people, they're happy to wear blinders to disruption in their routine (AKA new ideas / better ways). So let them hire programmers who were accountants in a former life.

If that kind of person is not you, then you're in luck. True to form, in choosing to discuss your passions, you interviewed differently. In doing that you discovered something very useful -- this is a place where you do NOT want to work. Epiphany revealed; the search continues.

You've already got a bunch of replies, still like to add something. I'm in the "I never felt anything towards coding" category. Tried to grow passion for it, just doesn't work. But I'd still be thrilled (and possibly intimidated) to see a passionate developer showing up for an interview. That these interviewers didn't get that you have passion for the work itself and not its outcome, not a great sign.

Hope you found something more fitting for your personality.

"Is this going to make you any money?"

The answer should be: yes, because you are hiring me now for the skills I learned doing this.

> "Is this going to make you any money?"

"Yes, by motivating you to hire me"

Seriously, did they expect new hires to be working on their startup on the side?

A perfect employee is someone who has all the skills necessary to build a successful company... but for some reason decided to build one for you, instead of for himself/herself.

I just want to say that I am the person that doesn't like doing anything unless it creates value. I am just wired differently. For me a useless project is a waste of time unless I'm trying to learn something new, and even then I try to find something that is going to be useful because otherwise I lose interest.

I don't know what it is. Maybe because I grew up relatively poor?

I also love programming but mostly when it solves an issue for a business. There is nothing better in the world as far as careers go. When I can make $150 an hour and create so much value for a business that they will gladly give me their money, its special.

In general I have hard time just relaxing, I prefer to do and build things around the house.

That's really tragic that people think like this. Not everything needs a "purpose", in fact many of the most beautiful things in life don't. Doing things for the intrinsic joy rather than for some end is a key to life actually imho. Those who must always do things with some future goal in mind, getting more money, power, stuff, prestige etc are missing out.

Ironically, tinkering for fun can lead to innovation. Many cases of this in maths, science and engineering.

If I'd have been interviewing you we'd have talked about those two projects a lot. Especially the OS kernel :)

I currently have two hobby projects "in development". An bot trader (it broke even over 6 months with pretend money).

And a logic analyser using a Raspberry Pi Pico board and the excellent sigrok software - this project took a baby step to being non hobby when another dev found it and raised some issues.

Don't stop with the hobby projects

Kudos to you, for working on the stuff that you really like. These toy projects could teach us or the people that see them, a lot of stuff.

"Senior Developers" doesn't mean that they will relate to everything related to software development. Either, they stick to the domain they work on or, to the ones that makes money.

Personally, I've always been fascinated with systems programming, thought I'm not much proficient or put in much effort. Whether something is going to make money or not, like many personal stuff we do (art for example), isn't eventually going to make us money, rather it gives us a sense of satisfaction.

Keep doing what you do!

> The interviewers (senior developers within the company) really just did not get it. Responding with questions such as: "Is this going to make you any money?", and "When do you expect this to be complete?".

I would expect that to be followed by, "Just kidding! I have side projects of my own, and that's what my wife says, haha! Don't you hate that?"

Here's what I tell those who question projects like these: By designing and implementing a game engine or a compiler or a microkernel, you become the sort of person who can do those things, and you become the sort of person who can do all the things that they entail. The product is not the software but the mind that makes it.

I think your initial approach is a brilliant way to interview a company to see it they're "your kind of people". If they have no interest in creative inventions or fresh ideas, run for the hills. You'll never be happy there.

Well they were interviewing you for a job not having a chat at a meetup or at the pub. I don’t think it’s an indictment of your interests rather if you “get” the question they’re asking you

I totally understand that whether you were offered the position or not isn't the key take away of the story.... But for the sake of my own wondering, did they offer you the position?

In this case I wasn't offered a position. The company in question is well known within a certain field, and has a reputation for having a difficult recruitment process. They were offering a very competitive salary, and I was admittedly excited at the prospect of working for a company with this kind of elite reputation. This was the final stage of the interview process. I had passed the technical challenges and initial interview. In the end, I was able to walk away from this experience with my pride mostly intact.

That's funny, I had the inverse interaction of someone telling me all theh wanted to do was be useful and I just could not relate. Like you, I do it because I like it.

If you can afford choosing your employer, this is a good test. Who wants to work with people that wouldn't be enthousiastic about such cool hobby projects? :)

Dodged a bullet there. What is the company like if the interviewers are like that?!

A lot of game developers have written a 'toy' game engine. A lot of embedded developers have written their own little OS. A lot of web developers have written a 'click this button to autogenerate web pages' tool. And so on.

Face it. You are just not that hot. Another X Compiler for Y. Great. Probably doesn't really work. Senior devs probably care more about that you can finish boring project or stack. Spend hours on some tiny thing and make it work.

It probably also depends on how you present those hobby projects. Instead of saying "Look, I am so cool!", you can say you use this as a means to become a better programmer.

It's good that the leadership was more interested in your useful professional projects rather than the less useful things you make for fun. As professionals in a business they should be more focused on trying to make money. People need to have some kind of strategy to make money in order to survive in business for any extended amount of time.

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