Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

With so many 'sub genres' in programming (machine learning, networking, frontend, etc.), what's your favorite one? For me, I really like sockets/TCP type programming in Rust and C but I'm curious what people like to code in free time.

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Whenever I get bored (rarely these days) I like to write path-finding & annealing algorithms. I start with a super simple ray-tracing framework I first wrote in the 1990's for visualization, and then I play around with things like gravity and electromagnetic repulsion / attraction. My favorite thing to do is watch a million charged spheres distribute themselves on a weird surface obeying gravity and electromagnetics, and then have another sphere try to navigate through them. It's pointless but satisfying. I'm sure Blender and Processing and all the new fancy tools can do it better, but I understand every single line of code, so I feel like it is something I made for me.

There was an old Stanford site with some basic interactive tools to visualize "electromagnetic particles". In one of them you would just sling electrons around a neutron and watch their orbits.

I credit it for being one of the reasons I learned to code because it made me think about how cool it was that somebody built that. (I was ~9 years old.)

Now I think I'll have to go finally reimplement that site from memory! I'm sure I can brute force the math with the help of Copilot :P

Would be sick if you could post a visualization.

Since last year I've been using Pixi.js (https://pixijs.com/) to create an app that puts video meetings into a 2d virtual space (https://flat.social). While learning how to build it, I got really (possibly a bit more than necessary) into optimising graphics performance to make sure it runs smoothly even for users who access it on potato laptops.

This includes pretty much every aspect of the rendering process - how often are elements updated, textures, masking, interpolation, fonts and making sure that nothing renders more often than it should. It's a challenging but pleasant process as the result of experimentation is usually easy to measure (FPS + memory usage).

PS. If you're into it as well - try Safari's web inspector for measuring performance and investigating which frames were dropped. I found it much easier to use for debugging than Chrome.

I was reading this and although I know nothing about the topic, these thoughts just entered my mind.

While on meeting many people are in mute. In that case something of the sort can be done that position/part of people on mute is rendered less frequently.

And people who don't have their camera on are only rendered once

Tinkering with microcontrollers is probably the most satisfying, because it really challenges you to understand exactly what is going on at all times, right down to the electrical level.

Developing for retro hardware can be fun too, for similar reasons.

I was recently able to get into microcontrollers for the first time on a work project (paid to learn something interesting!), and definitely agree. Getting to the pulsewidth-level of different protocols and learning whole new ways to debug has been really fun.

I’m really glad to hear this. Building hardware for the real world amplified the power of software incredibly.

PS…we’re hiring firmware engineers to bring hardware to life.

> PS…we’re hiring firmware engineers to bring hardware to life.

Who is "we"? Your profile doesn't say.

Whoops! Fixed it!

Would be glad to apply.. ;-)

Just updated my profile, check out the link there.

>Tinkering with microcontrollers is probably the most satisfying

Not so satisfying when seeing the pay-grade compared to other CS fields.

If your satisfaction comes from a paygrade, it’s probably a false positive

Do you expect your spare-time programming projects to fall in a specific salary range?

No son of mine will join the local youth soccer team unless he gets a competitive salary and 401(k)!

Any advice on best way to get started?

Autodifferentiable programming!

Neural networks are the famous example of this, of course -- but this can be extended to all of scientific computing. ODE/SDE solvers, root-finding algorithms, LQP, molecular dynamics, ...

These days I'm doing all my work in JAX. (E.g. see Equinox or Diffrax: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox, https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax). A lot of modern work is now based around hybridising such techniques with neural networks.

I'd really encourage anyone interested to learn how JAX works under-the-hood as well. (Look up "autodidax") Lots of clever/novel ideas in its design.

Arguably too large to be a niche, but I love everything web development.

Making projects that anyone can pull up on nearly any device via their browser, without installing anything, is so incredibly satisfying. You can make anything run in browser these days including games and full fledged applications. You can make art and interactive experiences, or you can share minimalist text based content, and either way it's very open for people of all walks to browse and experience how they like.

In some ways I was raised on free internet experiences, from early flash games, to IRC, to forums and boards, to wikipedia, to youtube, eventually to HN... we really are blessed with so much stuff that is so accessible and I love to contribute even small things to the massive ecosystem.

I miss flash games

Tbh your favorite niche will stop becoming favorite when you know enough about it.

When I was bitbanging wires to talk (in a simple way) to another chip the first few times it was exciting. Now it's open schematics, figure out what to connect, do simple tests, get it to work.

On the other hand, if you don't do your favorite niche for your day job and you have limited time to work on it, it can keep you entertained for years.

Things I consider fun to do but haven't ever done:

- my own programming language

- a non trivial game from start to finish

- some kind of database/knowledge storage thing (this is fuzzy)

- other stuff related to carrying bits across wires and machines (even more fuzzy, but I do seem to like moving people's bits around)

> your favorite niche will stop becoming favorite when you know enough about it.

This is a good time to write a "Lies Programmers Believe About (Niche)" piece.

> This is a good time to write a "Lies Programmers Believe About (Niche)" piece.

And switch careers to blogging about programming? New niche!

Then you can write Lies Programmers Believe About Blogging".

I try to create scripts for anything.

Tools have evolved a lot now, so there's less stuff to script for but still I like it.

When I open my PC my browser, mails, text editor, slack, teams etc will load up. Browser will have few tabs opened.

My current development project will be up and running.

My machine will ping another machine which will note the time I came in and when it's time to go that will be noted too. Helps to know time spent.

When I was in corporate, our office required 2 punch ins, 1 for general entrance into building and 1 for office timings. It was okay if sometimes you forgot to punch in for office as they had agreement with building staff that allowed them access to our office staff entry exit stamp. But if you don't put in office punch in and do the punch out it'd create false entry and one had to go to HR office to get things correctly set.

I found that office punch in machine was on network, by asking to networking and hardware team I got proper code to do remote punch ins. Never had any missing punch after that.

There's also a script which does a routine check on all my clients website like, ping them, login, check 1-2 page and logout. Do it twice a day. Once when machine is started and once in middle of the day. It has saved me countless times when some code is pushed and if that breaks I usually have enough time to fix it before someone from client side notices it.

Had WhatsApp message related script too before they banned other tools access on the app. But I hear now API is allowing that automation again, haven't tried to do it though..

Used to have a script in js for browser console to read HN in dark mode, but had to put it every time a page loaded so have given up on it.

Usually I make them in python or shell. supervisor has been a gift as well.

OS kernel programming. Modern Linux is too complicated for me, so I pick something smaller that can be easily understood by reading docs for a few hours: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html

You'll see various folks publish their xv6 modifications on Github.

BTW, my daily work is mobile app dev (mostly Kotlin, sometimes Flutter). Totally unrelated, eh?

Pen Plotting. For those unaware, pen plotters are basically tabletop robots that you can put a pen into and have it draw whatever you want. There's a friendly online community of people making art with them on twitter (search #plottertwitter) and instagram.

It's nice to have a coding-related outlet that also produces something tangible you can hold in your hand or put on a wall.

These are far more satisfying than dot matrix or laser printers. I used to draw stage lighting plots with them in college in the mid-80's. So much fun to watch them work.

I worked in a construction company where we drawed blueprints in AutoCAD for these pen plotters. It was very soothing to see them work, but we had this pervert engineer who would caress the long brush's hairs under them and whisper sexy things. Unfortunately, that is irremediably linked in my mind to pen plotters.

I want to buy that robosexual colleague of yours a beer. Maybe he could seduce my apartment's AC into actually working in the summer?

> he

Gotcha!

He was an heterosexual male, he thought the brush hairs felt like female pubic hair. Despite that, he was a cool guy in other contexts.

1) Cryptography done right - instead of blindly reading & using algorithms, figure out how people got there. Requires some math background, progress is very slow, but the reward is many "ahaaa!" moments.

2) Trying/inspecting all sorts of Lisps out there. There are so many crazy ideas tried and implemented over the last 40-50 years that IMHO, any new modern language feature probably already exists in some form in some Lisp compiler or interpreter.

Scientific programming, i.e., short term problem solving, especially when working with physical measurements and experiments. The work involves a combination of programming (desktop and embedded), physics, electronics, etc. I get to choose my own tech stack (Python and Arduino), and to a large extent, my battles.

I like the fact that Mother Nature ultimately conducts my performance review. She doesn't care about tech fads, personality test scores, or office politics. She doesn't tire of proving me wrong, over and over again.

Germane to other comments in the thread, I'm aware of the salary disparities in the different castes of tech workers. On the other hand, unless someone is exceptionally disciplined and motivated, it takes something more than pay to propel a career.

While in college, I had a summer internship in a computer facility. My present job is in a building with a large team of devs. I get to see what they actually do.

I've wondered to myself if I'd be happy enough as a developer to do it for as long as I've done my present job, or if I'd just get bored and burn out, or start to misbehave.

Early 90s 3D engines. Raycasting, sprite scaling, SNES mode 7, voxels, early flight/space sims.

Yeah, software rendering engines were works of art.

I see a lot on this lately. Why is that? Just hobby or there is positive economical return?

It's highly unlikely that there is an economical return, because modern engines are radically different.

I like this as well, so my guess is that some people grew with an interest in game development, and they still find it interesting to explore it.

Game algorithms were also "not easy" in the 90s, but since the codebases were overall smaller, they're more approachable then modern ones.

There was a short period of time where software rendering engines were able to do some interesting things before hardware rendering took over and they all died out. There is still untapped potential in a lot of the techniques, which is fun exploring.

I'm using them for a game I will be releasing. I think very few games these days regardless of engine used or graphical style has a chance of a net positive return, so that part doesn't bother me.

Kind of algorithmic-archeology. And that game of yours, just curious, you did it as a side-project or more serious? Solo or in a team?

Yeah, it's neat to see how people solved problems. It feels good to say "this is the algorithm that adds lighting" rather than "I set the camera at xyz, a light at xyz, a model at xyz, and called render()". Today I added some code to create comic-style outlines of objects.

I have a small library of books from the era on 3D graphics that are fun to read through (I especially like the speculation on how DOOM achieved its speed and "realism"). Andre LaMothe and Christopher Lampton have some good stuff, plus the black book of Michael Abrash.

I tried doing indie gamedev as a full time job for a year a while back, learned that was a quick way to lose all my savings :) so now I do it as a side project while having a full time job. If any of my games bring in some pocket change, all the better. Less stress for sure but also much slower progress. My brother does the music and sounds, and I do the code and graphics (plus some commissioned assets).

Lately I've been playing around with learning type theory and writing parsers and langauges.

But I seem to gravitate towards writing code to decode various file formats. Over the years I've reverse engineered Apple Notes database, written code to read the realm database backing Craft.app, code to read couchdb files, lucene files, git pack files, sqlite databases (I have js code that runs queries against raw database files), etc.

I'm also interested in compression and cryptography. (Implementing toy systems to learn how stuff works.)

Not my area at all, but reverse-engineering file formats sounds really interesting. Do you have a blog by any chance?

I should write this stuff up, but I haven't.

I do have some brief notes on the "Notes.app" format here:

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils/blob/master/notes....

But I didn't discuss my methodology -- Generic decoding of protobuf, building up a schema as you go -- the tricky part there is that a byte array and a substructure look the same, so you have to try to decode it, and if successful, try that schema on the next example.

Here is another fun technique - scanning through a disassembly of an Apple framework looking for assembly patterns that match the protobuf compiler output (this was dependent on which language was targeted by protobuf):

https://gist.github.com/dunhamsteve/224e26a7f56689c33cea4f0f...

So you find the serializer / deserializer code and figure out what the original protbuf spec looked like.

For lucene / sqlite, I used the docs on the web site.

SQLite got me a little experience with b-trees (as did couch), and I got to write a little query planner.

Lucene was interesting because it was compact, had some skip lists for fast lookup, and was a log-structured merge tree. I borrowed bits of it for an index in a binary file format for work.

For realmdb / couchdb, I looked at the source code.

I did realm so I could extract my Craft.app docs. It's interesting because it's a column structured database, so I got to learn a little bit about that. I also learned that C++ had changed a bit since I last used it (lambdas!).

And couch is an append-only btree. I got to learn to read Erlang with that project.

I've also have a web scraper that reads from the Chrome cache (whose format keeps changing). I archive things like recipes that show up in the cache.

And I've got code on github that decodes iOS desktop backups, which some people have found useful. (Written mainly so I could poke around in various applications' data and extract stuff from my keychain.)

Re keychain, you're probably aware of it, but https://github.com/ptoomey3/Keychain-Dumper/ is very thorough in extracting keychain data (including data that one would expect to no longer be in there).

Thanks for the notes on Notes!

As I said, it's way out of my wheelhouse, but I'm planning on spending some time in the next months on trying to merge a decrypted backup of old iOS Signal chat history into the decrypted backup of current Android chat history and trying to restore from that (re-encrypted) backup (there is no native iOS to Android transfer on Signal yet), so I'm starting to look into any learning material that will allow me to not fail within the first 2 minutes of trying :).

Definitely do start writing this stuff up!

Scrapers! I love scraping stuff, beating the anti-scrapers, finding the simplest way to scrape a page (with HTTP requests, I very rarely use headless browsers or browser automation), cleaning up the data, building something around it…

Weirdly I find it very relaxing.

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) holds a particular fascination to me. It’s hard to find the necessary focus time to work on during the weekends though, what with the family needing some attention.

I usually end up writing simple native apps to ease silly pain points in my day-to-day life - low cognitive load, high perceived benefit. I try to get raw sockets involved whenever possible. There’s something satisfying about moving bytes around yourself. Kinda like DIY home projects.

Systems for expressing game components as data that closely matches how you'd describe them in natural language. And ways to write the data as code literals that don't look very different than the data format.

I'm mostly interested in turn based games where everything can be made simpler by leveraging the fact that it's OK to have a computational spike in response to a player input.

I once had a system where expressing game components and game states was so straightforward that writing tests felt like playing the game, because 95% of my effort in writing a test was in creatively thinking about game states and components and 5% translating it to data. I normally find writing tests very unpleasant but in this case it wasn't just tolerable, but actually fun.

Search engines. In recent years its become increasingly difficult to navigate the popular search engines. Results have become too general, too much SEO spam, not enough tools for filtering results, a lot of page bloat. I'm currently working on my own search engine[0] to test a few ideas I have for improving search results. Right now its mostly just a front end for the bing index with some adjustments, but I'm working on creating my own index.

[0] https://simplesearch.org

Writing rollback netcode for games. It's difficult, and often frustrating, when you're in the thick of it, but when you get things working it's incredibly satisfying.

I really like reading RFCs and then implementing the protocols that they describe. Preferably just do it in some plain language without any libraries, just plain old TCP/UDP.

A few years back, I needed an x-plat crypto library for HMAC/SHA1 on an open-source project. So, I wen't to the RFCs and built it myself - really fun.

What have been some highlights for you? This is something that's struck me in passing a couple of times as a potentially interesting kind of project.

For fun, programming microcontrollers with Forth. Personally, I find programming an Arduino Uno with Froth much more enjoyable than using the Arduino IDE. You can issue commands from your terminal to your microcontroller to test out different bits of your code. For example, the word "start" starts a motor and the word "stop" stops it. No need to recompile your code.

For work, I like the infrastructure as code space. Bringing order to chaos.

Working in a relational language, to resurrect the spirit of the Base/FoxPro family:

https://tablam.org

This is the thing I wish to do full time, but even if not is so interesting! Is not just "making a programming language" is that it touch parts of "make a in-memory database" + "array programming for the masses" that makes it more challenging!

I'm partial to compiler design. there's just something magical about bringing a new language to life, and liberating to use very different paradigms (e.g. symbolic, weird type systems, declarative.)

also, accessibility tools. largely pragmatic, since my limbs are slowly betraying me, but I genuinely enjoy the bootstrapping aspect, and the empowerment.

My favorite subgenre is when my commit looks like:

    3 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 562 deletions(-)

I was once added to a team to help improving their code base. At the end of the project they made an overview how many lines each of the team members added to the code base. Mine was negative. :)

Who / what company added you to do that? How did they get convinced you could do that job?

My favorite programming niche is SEO optimization. I really like optimizing pages and see the traffic grow.

People are trashing you but making pages load correctly and quickly is easily part of SEO and very important.

Exactly.

That's not programming, mate.

There’s so much programming you can’t even imagine. Core web vitals, ttfb, sitemaps, robots.txt, mobile first optimizations, responsive design, keyword monitoring, meta tags, url structures, and a dozen more super challenging tasks.

It's not computation in a traditional sense, but it's programming of a kind.

There’s a lot of computation as well, for example NLP for keyword research, finding trends and drawing graphs in keyword monitoring, and do much more.

Are you good at it? How long does it take to do 80% of the job? Do you freelance?

The best #1

Must be thrilling. Easy to sell too.

Here’s the result http://catonmat.net/if-you-build-it-they-will-come

Impressive.

In general and at work, I like to learn and get better at Distributed Systems. In my free time, I like to learn how to do things faster: Vim, Tmux, Git, Scripting, Automation, System Administration. The joy I get when I figure out something new always gets me craving for more.

Okay, I'll byte.

I love almost every aspect of computing, from software to hardware.

Distributed systems, networking, single-machine vertical scaling, graphics programming, statistics and ML, NLP, vision, frontend.

Also love server hardware, grew up water-cooling and overclocking systems in the late nineties and early 00s.

I also find it fulfilling to help friends and family resolve their computer problems.

I'd like to learn more about embedded systems, I fantasize about creating my own devices stop esp32, but haven't gotten close to having time to explore this yet.

I will learn and use whatever language it takes to get the outcome I wish :)

I will also say that as I'm getting a bit older, I'm a little sick of the physically boring aspect of sitting in front of a computer for many hours on end. No longer appealing.

Cheers.

> I'm a little sick of the physically boring aspect of sitting in front of a computer for many hours on end.

you ever try a standing desk?

Standing desk is actually all I use now! It's improved my physical well-being tremendously.

Microsoft’s mobile framework: Maui (previously named Xamarin). It’s not nearly as popular as React Native but it’s wonderful to work with and it’s great having a company like Microsoft behind it. I’ve been working in it for 8 years now and still having a blast.

This is not a proper niche, and way to broad, but: "implementation niche" is kinda my thing.

Some examples-

1. Artificial life design and simulation

2. Biological systems simulation and research, like, computational neuro science

3. Implememting math. The "science" in computer science

4. Deep Reinforcement Learning

5. Designing and implementing algorithms

6. Simulating physical systems

7. Computational Math

So, "modeling" in general, loosely. Also "optimization".

Other than these:

I like edge devices and microcomputers. I love everything about them.

Other niches that I exposed myself to, but didn't like:

1. Programming art (NOT ai art like Stable Diffusion, GANs, etc.)- I never found it that good.

2. Networking.

3. Databases.

Kinda neutral about frontend. Don't like, don't dislike.

Seems interesting now, but I know little to nothing about:

1. Cryptography

2. Quantum Information and Computation

Working on mechanical keyboard design. I learned so much about CNC and other manufacturing methods, relearned a lot about electronics and most entertainingly learned more than I ever thought I’d know about the USB protocol.

Shader programming blows my mind, especially those niche programmers who are able to create entire scenes using only shaders.

For examples: www.shadertoy.com For learning: thebookofshaders.com

Blockchain/smart contracts, Lisp, reverse engineering.

For work: Backend and distributed systems in general.

For fun: Emulation! I’ve only written one emulator so far (Gameboy Color), but I’ll probably do more in the future :)

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

My favorite one being jsfuck since it works in-browser already.

Revealed preferences say "making FreeBSD work in VMs". So far I've ported FreeBSD to EC2 and Firecracker...

Character sets and internationalization. I just spent a year building a one-way libiconv-ish library called cpgtou, including chasing down MS-DOS Code Page 709. https://github.com/torstenvl/cpgtou

I created https://Bigger.Bio as a way for The TikTok crowd and Instagramers to put multiple links on their profiles bios and do cross promotion. Admittedly it's not rocket science but an interesting project nonetheless.

Chatbots. I've written so many over the course of my life on everything from a Haskell math solving IRC bot to a chatops bot where I can check on my personal builds and AWS environment just by asking it in plain English. I even did one to help with my Discord D&D dming.

Disassembling DOS malware. I also like 80s/90s game (engine) development as well :)

Writing high-performance JIT compilers. I am lucky enough to get paid for it as well.

I really love working through Project Euler problems and coding the solutions to them. That, and very recently making a Game boy emulator in Rust. Never had any clue how emulators work and it's just so much fun.

Embedded systems with Elixir/Nerves. Fun to work with and the business opportunities are endless. My current startup measures the content of water in storage tanks with a realtime dashboard for vineyards.

I'd love to learn more. I've spent some time with elixir, but never any time with embedded systems.

How would you recommend getting started?

short programs that do something interesting

https://dwitter.net

https://www.google.com/search?q=bytebeat

https://twitter.com/hashtag/tweetcart

https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=4k&page=1

Test automation in the browser without use of third party libraries or frameworks. Just a test runner in Node sending tests to the browser in localhost that execute user events in the DOM

The demoscene. All the malarkey the Lisp hackers got up to.

What's socket/tcp type programming? Is that a whole genre of software development - I mean a specialization in itself?

Zero-Knowledge Cryptography

P2P protocols, networking in general

Real time operating systems or a bit less niche all around embedded systems: memory management, safety, etc..

Event driven declarative programming for user interfaces hits the spot for me. Built my career around it

code analysis and transformation tools. I love working with code as data; there's something magical about being able to do deeper things with the code than the actual language interpreter or compiler typically does.

Trying to make a program that a 93 year old grandmother could extend herself.

Does it look like a recipe?

I struggle on finding a niche. Happy that other people found theirs

As of recent I've been weirdly fascinated with codecs, serialization protocols, file formats, and the like. It scratches that low-level hacking itch (I spent most of my professional programming in web dev space) without as much commitment to electronics (used to be super big into arduino but I find that's harder to pick up and put down).

I've started hacking on my own container format (yeah, I know, xkcd927), after finding it super frustrating to embed arbitrary time-synched data streams into mp4/matroska/ogg/etc. Also it bugs me how crusty, complicated, and arcane mp4 is, and at the same time, mastroska and ogg are weirdly opaque given how they are supposed to be open standards.

If anyone is curious, here's my container format I've been developing: https://github.com/xkortex/sito

my favourite is data serialization / byte encoding. like protobuf, messagepack, and custon written ones.

some have really interesting approaches on storing different types of data.

Obscure operating systems and programming languages. I've spent a fair amount of time recently deep diving Temple OS and Holy C which a large chunk of the former was written in. I don't care much for Holy C but I have learned things reading through Terry Davis' implementation of it.

something zero copy / in-memory or a 3D game

Learning random tools in devops

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