Ask HN: Who's having a ton of fun at work and what are you doing?

I am refitting a 44-foot sailboat, repowering it with an electric motor and lithium batteries; solar panels and a wind generator to come. Lots of practical work with my hands: wiring, plumbing, carpentry, fiberglass, sewing, drilling, sanding, wrenching, tinkering. After decades of complicated software efforts, a majority of which have never gone anywhere, it feels really satisfying to build things that you can see and touch, that stay built once you're done with them, useful in a way you can experience. Someday in the near future we'll set sail and go see more of the world - generating our own power, our own propulsion, our own fresh water; living by the sun and the wind and the waves, embedded in the natural world.

I'm learning unreal engine 5 to make vr games. I try to make stuff or find stuff online and then I put it in VR and I can look at it up close, or eventually fight it or team up with it. It's pretty hard but it's just nonstop fun.

VR is a new medium. We're in that stage now where people are sort of putting stuff from the old medium in without much consideration of what new concepts or ideas might be possible. Every UI in every game and application is terrible. Everything has to be reinvented, and can be reimagined in incredibly creative and strange ways.

Fairly often now I'll have an experience in real life and think "Someday, I'm going to put this in VR game."

Early on in my career I noticed that the most fun programming seems to be done by people who are not actually trained as computer scientists: mathematicians, physicists, engineers, chemists, astronomers ...etc This sort of numerical computing and simulation stuff is incredibly fun and quite rewarding. You work much more often on core logic and much less often on boring fluff. Of course it is all very subjective and it pays shit. So the answer is: research at a research uni, employed by an applied mechanical engineering lab, but trained as a mathematician.

I make a lot more money now, but the most fun I ever had at work was busking on the subway with a friend 12 years ago.

At work, we have a .Net 6 codebase that had some odd design decisions made in the past couple years. Roughly ~115 classes using Unity for dependency injection instead of ASP.NET Core DI, and this horrible Unity-based service locator pattern used all over the place. Since nothing was using constructor injection and instead just grabbed deps from calls to a global static locator willy-nilly, it was very difficult to tell how many dependencies a given class had. The worst classes were injecting 30-40 dependencies, but you couldn't tell this in looking at them.

Anyway - I was tasked with removing Unity and refactoring the service locator usage, since Unity was going to be unsupported soon. Doing this gave me a real sense of agency in our otherwise boring enterprise app; it was one of the rare chances where I could make a significant, wide-scale improvement that would make future development easier for everyone.

I work on a childrens book app ([redacted]). It is a total blast. I am kind of a rock star at my kids school (as most schools use the app at this point). School kids beg for different features - their ideas are super fun. My kids are interested on what I work on - watching them pick out books to read is fun. Teaching kids to read - makes it easier to wake up in the morning. [Nice change from soul crushing ad work].

I am designing a microchip for gravitational wave measurements, at the same time trying to understand and model the problems not showing in the simulations of the previously designed chips. We will soon begin with the design of new chips for the next generation Large Hadron Collider. In my opinion, in addition to what I am working on, the freedom in the working environment and colleagues' love for what they are doing is one of the main reasons I am having a lot of fun at work.

A couple years back I switched from web dev to graphics programming on a game team at a big AAA studio

Really enjoy the work itself, there’s tons of interesting algorithms/optimization involved

I feel I actually use my CS knowledge from university more doing this work

Its also really satisfying to visually see the result of your code in the game

On the other hand I do find it a lot harder of a job since you not only have to understand code but also the math behind the code

Fighter WSO. Adventure, comradery, great group of colleagues with a diverse initial background, and shared recent background. My desk job responsibilities are limited, so I usually go home after debrief and do/learn whatever I want, and work on projects. Liberal leave policy. Just hoping I don't end up with a chronic neck/back injury, or die in a crash.

Re-writing a 10-year-old server backend system with matching client-side applications, all of which were abandoned, with no documentation, and which were written in this abhorrent hybrid of C/C++ with more goto's than functions, no const correctness, no unit tests, no testing of any sort, combined with amazingly bad and repetitive spaghetti code everywhere; I am re-writing this in a form that allows for test driven development, code coverage validation, with a matching ci system that performs all the integration testing and deployment automation.

Yeah this is a ton of fun!

It's not every day you get the chance to just re-write something [it rarely is the best idea] but when you do, I relish it.

Working on forecasting solar irradiance at ground level without using physical simulations but only using ML. The idea is to have better and more granular forecasts in order to optimize grid-scale energy storage facilities and peak-power plants to reduce CO2 emissions.

Still entangled in combining the different data sources before start building/training models. So, I'm not having much fun right now, but soon!

"ghostwriting" AI research. Last year optical flow, early this year 3D recognition, last month segmentation, and now speech recognition. Lots of interesting problems and our customers have the practical applications. I maybe worked a bit too much recently because it's so much fun.

Research in finance; job is open ended mandate to find ways to optimise systems, decision processes and alpha signals. Using R mainly, dropping into c++ for some performance stuff. Occasional use of machine learning.

I took apart a 650,000 BTU oven burner this morning for cleaning, and had to clean out the oven exhaust damper that was starting to get build-up. Soon I’ll be at my desk programming again thankfully.

Me. My company is (relatively) small enough that a single engineer can still make impacts, if you're on the right team. I'm on a small team where I know/own most of the engineering tech, and am trusted by my lead on input. It's mostly DE/back-end/front end, however we use a ton of data for some science-based processes and there's always room for optimizing when we have time.

I actually look forward to work/don't dread Sundays at all.

Came here for positive stories. :) Every time I tried turning things I like into a job turned them into things I hate. ( As soon as the "must" factor is introduced, "fun" evaporates. That's how I stopped being a paid programmer.

PS: related HN article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107128

I work on an email marketing product. The product itself is not much different to any other SAAS product but the company pays for me to work in the office which is in another state every quarter so it feels like a free holiday 4x a year. And usually there is a company paid for party/events on in that time.

I'm a DS during the day but recently I started teaching python/ML to a couple of kids (around 8y). It's super nice to see them have fun!

When teaching ML, we mainly used pre-trained models. They learn the concept of data, train/test split, accuracy, and to build programs which use these models.

I am having ton of fun at my current team at Google working on https://pigweed.dev/. I also get to work closely with various hardware teams using these libraries in their products.

IaaS provider with like 20 years of a tech debt. Everytime I make something which ease or improve day to day Ops is marvelous.

EDIT: in a man/years sense, we don't run pre-historic software. Although some of our clients are still on Win2008 and CentOS6...

Part of having fun at work is figuring out how to make work fun yourself. Sure not every task is fun, but having fun is as much a perspective as it is an aspect of the work itself.

UX design for e-commerce stores worldwide. Working with a cool team, with solid leadership. Learning the most I’ve ever learned I my life. Having a blast

Engineering in the research world can be fun. You work with the latest cool technologies together with many experts in many various domains.

I am, I am bootstrapping a studio via the Creative Tim freemium model of building free and paid uikits to build the studio.

GPU hardware architecture. It's just a never ending stream of fun problems to solve and I love it!

I genuinely enjoy the day-to-day of building desktop software applications for engineers.

Crickets. Ok bad joke. I used to enjoy a lot making games and XR apps in Android/iOS/Hololens for small companies. Nowaday I work on automation for one of the large ones, which I find easy and interesting.

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