Ask HN: Are you still programming for fun? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you still programming for fun?

31 pointskirso27 comments

A quick background: I started learning programming for the sake of building stuff. Quite frankly even the ability to help in any way during the crisis in Europe by collating information on the web is a seriously valuable skill. It sounds trivial to many here, but just a small contribution like that seems like a superpower.

As a job, it doesn't seem super enticing though. I started wondering how many people actually still do it because they enjoy it compared to "out of necessity"?

Feeling of creating something out of nothing, even super simple and uncomplicated but useful feels very rewarding...

Wordle is a good example of just a simple piece of software that is elegant in its own way and was created for fun instead of drilling on specifics of making something scalable or achieving an OKR. It feels like it's a lost philosophy nowadays where everyone is chasing unicorns and money.

Where did all the fun go?

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I am 70 years old pensioner and I seem to be number 222 of most productive github contributors in Finland.

Very strange, because this is not a hobby or a job. I just desperately try to maintain and improve failing home automation.

https://commits.top/finland.html

I loved reading this comment for so many reasons!

Wow.

I don’t enjoy programming or do it for fun like I did when I started 40 years ago. But I do enjoy solving complex problems and making my customers happy. The coding part is mostly incidental in the bigger picture of satisfying customers (or bosses and users).

Eventually every programmer realizes that there’s very little actually new in the software world. Ideas and techniques that work get recycled and repackaged, and we can do more because of more powerful hardware and the internet. But programming today is not fundamentally different from what it was 2, 3, or 4 decades ago. At first everything is new and exciting, and small differences (like C++ to Rust, or PHP to Node) look like bigger innovations than they actually turn out to be. Most programming work is repetitive and not especially intellectually challenging after a while. That realization can lead to disappointment, boredom, cynicism. That’s when you have to find satisfaction and pride in other aspects of the career.

I knew a plumber who had been in the business for 30 years. Once he was clearing a clogged drain at my house and I asked him if he ever got tired of plumbing. He said the work isn’t really interesting, but it pays well. Then he said he loves fixing things and leaving happy customers. Programming isn’t any different.

Thats a great comment, thank you for that!

I wonder where is this boundary in terms of intellectually challenging, because thats how programming feels at this point to me but I am still at the beginning.

In the end its probably just a mean to an end to fulfil something more grandiose in terms of a solution to a problem.

Also reminded me of: "Everything is a remix" video.

I'm in my mid 40s, and started programming for fun / challenge 35 years ago. For the first time in my life, my answer would seem to be no, I'm not. I'm not sure exactly why. Some form of long-term burnout perhaps. Working in the industry for 20 years certainly disillusioned me, on balance, more than it inspired me. But I sort of non-committaly retired 4 years ago, so in theory had time to recover if it was that.

The last time I wrote code for fun was in 2019 when I went through all the easy and medium leetcodes and quite enjoyed it. More recently this year I got around to finishing all the pretend-assembly-language Zachtronics games (TIS-100, Shenzhen IO, Exapunks), and had a lot of fun there too. But for the first time I'm not working on any real personal projects, despite that my notebook of ideas is as full as ever.

I still believe in these ideas and want to see them realized. But at this point, working on any of them implies writing / adapting tons of things I've already written. Probably a lot of things I've already written 3 times or more. But that doesn't quite seem like a reason either, since I always used to love rewriting things. I don't feel depressed - quite happy actually. It's just that when I open a project and look at the code and start thinking about the next steps, I'm just like "Nah."

> Where did all the fun go?

For me, a lot of the fun evaporated when I could find others had written a dozen other programs doing exactly what I was thinking of, often better than I could have.

The rest of the fun evaporated due to (this was the 1990s) compiler churn; every year there would be new compiler versions, some of which required nontrivial changes to existing code, and the compilers often had such poor documentation that their own examples wouldn't compile. "Solving problems" turned into "trying to use broken tools", of which Microsoft Macro Assembler 4.0 was surely the worst offender.

I did my time as a sarariman writing software, but it was just a job by then.

Yeah, I do exactly zero code katas and toy programs. A singer can post on YouTube. A painter can sell his art to hang up on the wall for years.

If I make a small DIY program, all I can do is use it while trying to pretend I wouldn't much rather be using the existing standard.

On the occasions where something doesn't already exist, it takes me between weeks and years to make anything I wouldn't just want to throw away. I'm not going to spend 2 years coding something that already exists.

The fun disappears the day you start building someone else’s dream instead of yours. Any project you aren’t passionate about will drain you quickly.

An analogy is people who love painting during their spare time does not mean they enjoy painting other peoples houses

The analogy in my case is it's like cooking someone else's favorite food. I do get some joy from them getting their dream thing. But in too many situations, a lot of founders don't even have a dream, they're just in it for the money.

My search engine is basically the result of a decision to build what I want instead of what I think will be commercially viable or scalable to planet wide adoption. It cannot be stated enough how much of a wet blanket those types of goals can be for creativity.

And mental well-being probably as well :) I tried the opposite approach too many times and it only led to misery and feeling of wasted time. So on board with this.

I love your search engine, particular the 'random' feature.

10 years of professional programming and I still do stuff for fun/learning. Last month I built an SMTP server from scratch in Go I could receive emails from gmail with. A few months before that I wrote a basic Lua implementation in Rust.

My impetus has always been seeing people who know so much more than me and me wanting to narrow that gap any way I can. I only do projects I think will be both fun and educational.

I’ve been programming for fun since I started in 1983

Same here! BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Z80 assembler, saving onto cassette tape, CP/M. Funny to think I didn't have a computer with a mouse until 2000. I've never done programming as a job. I started doing a CS degree in the early 90s. I had a friend with a job programming in an office, something to do with money and corporate clients, I went one day to see what he did at work and it was so depressing I quit my degree.

It's still a lot of fun.

Very similar arc for me though I did it as a pro ;)

Normally yes, but not lately. I have a pet project that seems a good fit for a deep learning approach, and while I have finished a few coursera certifications in deep learning, I find that the process is not fun at all. It all seems arbitrary and unintuitive, and the largest chunk of effort is putting together a sane data set, and then countless iterations of training and discovering new mistakes. I enjoy systems programming, but I am not getting any of my systems-y kicks from this exercise.

Why did you start this project?

To scratch an itch. It's been on the back of my mind for a long time.

Yes, I'm still programming for fun by doing pets, and I always try to get some fun from my payable work. It's the only way to move on being a programmer, as I think.

I got into programming for the sense of leverage over various problem domains. That evolved into a habit of tracking the better libraries and eventually the better languages. Now my hobby practice is where I on-board new technology to my brain before I want to think about it or propose it to others. I rather enjoy that practice, still.

No, I'm sick of programming. I do it full time at work and it just feels like an endless chore. I haven't enjoyed it for at least 5 years or more.

As for doing it as a hobby, it just seems the minimum expectations has grown so much that it's just not worth the bother anymore.

I am in a situation that I want to learn new things about programming, but at the same, I can't find anything I am interested to learn, because either they are not attractive (just another tool to solve the same problem) or I don't have opportunity to use them.

In job? Nôt quite fuň, but sometimes... Especially solving interesting problems

I do enjoy working on my side projects. But its more about what i build than programing itself.

Enter side projects. Problem solved! :D

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