Awesome but Useless
awesomebutuseless.com
awesomebutuseless.com
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a hacker at heart and love to get under the hood, pull things apart, and put them back together. But the more I do this, the more I hear this little voice in my head say, "Wait a minute. Sure it's cool, but what's the point?"
I have started using an approach that satisfies both my need to hack and my desire to be useful: I try to hack not the stuff that I find interesting, but that which my customers do. It took a little while to get used to (who cares about past due orders when I could be playing with HTML5?), but I have been pleasantly surprised. Grokking someone else's stuff may not lead to many happy dances, but it sure is fun watching someone with money to spend do a happy dance of their own.
Learning.
Learning is of course awesome. It's the entire point of life. We are all here to learn.
But, excessively doing things solely for the sake of "learning" is actually doing a disservice to yourself. You should do things with tangible applications to real people besides yourself, too.
There are a lot of preliminary or experimental avenues to explore, but once you find a handful with promise, my advice would be to try to follow those more deeply and apply the principles you learned to something with direct applicability.
What you'll find is that by turning an experiment into a product, you've actually learned a lot more than you ever thought that little idea could yield up. You'll gain not only depth but also breadth as you explore the implications of that product in various fields, gauge peers' reactions to the product and marketing, and attempt to develop your idea into a repeatable, profitable boon.
Tinkering is really important for a lot of reasons, but endless, exclusive tinkering results in a very superficial knowledgebase. I recommend that everyone follow several of their promises tinkers down the rabbit hole and see what comes out of it. I recognize that this takes effort and commitment, but I think you'll often be surprised at the results.
Ah, good times.
He just decided to use "/=" rather than "|="...so it looks weird...
b) """But, doing a lot of things solely for the sake of "learning" is actually doing a disservice to yourself."""
Your two statements contradict each other.
Why do you go on walks? Read fiction books? Hang out with friends? I think one of the ruts a lot of hackers (myself included) can fall into is thinking that everything that they do needs to have a point to it that furthers some long term goal. Somethings can be done just because you want to.
Exactly. And just to expand on this a bit, the process and resulting value of an experience should not be discounted. This is the foci of experiential learning. I can only speak for myself here, but the way I've learned best has always been by getting into something and doing it! Not always successfully, but rarely without gaining some kind of knowledge in the process. Importantly, for me, an important aspect of this has always been because it was "cool" to me. It it weren't...I'd probably lose my focus or quickly get bored.
We need both - the former are the toolmakers and typically push the tech in new directions that become practical later on. The latter are the tool-users and take what's been learned from the tool-maker's efforts and apply it to the real, functioning world.
Do I really have time for AwesomeButUseless.com? Why, of course I do :)
I was a lot like you once, until I suddenly realized that taking a step back every now and then actually brings a net positive in productivity because a lot of the time when you're busy and stressed what is actually happening is you're just doing work but not getting things done.
My suggestion to you: take a look at your todo's, delete everything that's been there for more than two weeks. Then delete everything where people don't die if you do it tomorrow instead of today.
Or, you know, completely disregard this comment, get back to your life, and watch yourself burn out faster than celluloid film.
Good article. Of course not all work that I do is the productive, or the so-called 'deliberate practice' kind. As referenced by the fact that I'm following up to my own comments on Hacker News. However an important difference between running a startup and playing a musical instrument is that I'd argue its a lot harder to know what the really effective work is, which means you'll generally have to try a few more things.
No, I'm not quite as bad as the charicature I've described above. I've found that doing a bit of daily exercise is one of the most important things not to give up when working on a startup. You feel and sleep a lot better which affects everything.
Sometimes just playing with my kid is the best thing to do when I'm moving toward being overworked.
You could use the techniques you saw in awesome CSS3 or WebGL demo.
You may get inspired by these demos to do something different.
Even simple looking at stuff (if it's not awesome enough for you to check out at how it's done, or you're not a programmer) at least refines your understanding of possibilities of different technologies, that kind of knowledge we use often without noticing it.
Hell, a post with playing paint.exe as audio data might give an idea for a killer 8bit chiptune dubstep track!
They say that even watching TV might be useful, depending on how you're doing it. (Can't remember the source, ironically.) So, we shouldn't be quick at labeling things useless.
After all, you probably have an ulterior motive in making something useful: that's pretty much the definition of "useful". But something complicated and useless? That's just cool.