I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend such enormous amounts of effort on such weird projects.
There's a great side-effect to these quirky projects. There's a Christian/Bible story called The Unmoved Rock. Essentially God tells some guy to go push against a huge boulder and he damn well near kills himself trying to move it over and over. After a while he complains and God points out that he never asked him to move the rock, just to push it, and now the guy is totally ripped and strong as an ox.
Essentially, however useless or niche these things are, you yourself grow with the making and crafting of them. You exercise and develop your creative thinking, and your problem solving skills.
Where did you learn this story?
I'm curious, because it's a cute little anecdote/illustration, but I'm fairly confident it's not in the Protestant Bible, having read that several times.
It's called "The Unmoved Rock", and available on-line.
Why are you judging people doing something they enjoy? You don’t have any hobbies that aren’t all economically profitable?
2) they do this to explore/test technology XYZ
3) they are so talented and experienced that it does not require enormous amount of time
4) for promotion, bragging rights
5) some combination of above
Also it is nice to develop 5-10 times quicker then in scrum/jira ticket driven development. I couldn't believe that in Saturday I can do more then 1-2 weeks in my job. I of course understand that this doesn't scale to team, but yeah it is nice to feel that you can write good code so fast as a rockstar developer
Not quite as good as Rollercoaster Tycoon in Assembly.. but close.
>You can’t be devoid of emotion and expect users to experience emotion after using it.
IOW, art.