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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

These are the type of posts that make some of us noobs feel like imposters, lol. (been coding webstack-ish for 10 years, fwiw, can't even begin to write an assembler though :shrug:)

Good on you though, we need inspiration too! And you definitely should feel great about pulling that off! I am imaging it must have been some really fantastic "flow" time! How did you feel while writing it? Did you have family or friend distractions? Did you feel super focused? What is that story?

What are some of your focus patterns that you have identified? What gets you motivated when you feel stuck?

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> can't even begin to write an assembler

An assembler is a 1-1 mapping. If you can read some text, and you can write some bytes, then you can write an assembler. Everything in between is just a case of reading the manual! It's just some ifs - if the user's written this instruction name, then emit these bytes.

I work on compilers and I'm awe of people who work on web apps because they genuinely seem far more complicated than what I do.

I mean, there is usually a pass to resolve labels, right? So it's not quite that simple. But not far from it.

That depends on how fancy you want to be, you can definitely implement an assembler with relative branches and no labels.

familiarity is not the same thing as simplicity

No I think we can look at simplicity/complexity absolutely to some degree.

A compiler is a nice pure function - one array of bytes to another array of bytes. You need to use some algorithms and data structures in there to do that, but it's fundamentally simple.

A web app is fundamentally complex - asynchronicity, interacting with other services, network connections, all kinds of chaos.

Thanks :)

I definitely got into the flow for the first couple of days when I was laying down the foundations, it was the weekend and there weren't many distractions. If it wasn't for that I'd likely not have gotten as far as I did during the rest of the time (during the week, when there were other things going on and I wanted to spend some time away from the computer).

I also found that having set myself a goal for the week (support all the instructions) along with a couple of stretch goals (gradle plugin, IntelliJ plugin - I only hit one of these within the time limit though) helped to keep me motivated, and kept me at it for at least an hour every day, even when there were other things going on.

If you had the skill and wherewithal to do something like this, would you want to spend vacation doing it? I think it's neat, but I'd probably want to get the hell away from my screen

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