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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

Does this guy make a living doing this kind of stuff? His results are always so high-level/unique. It feels like he puts 100s of hours into the results.

I'm always so worried like "corporate has their foot on my neck, I need to make sure I logged enough work to Jira and am showing enough sprint points worth of delivery week after week".

I can't imagine just being "free" and getting to do what I want/when I want/at my own pace/investing this level of time + effort + resources into passion projects...

I guess it's not a super big investment money wise. Probably $100-$200 in prototyping materials. But how much time are we talking? A few hours a day/night on average after work? For... years?

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I've been doing this for a couple decades now, and I've never had a job where I had to put in more than 40 hours on a regular basis. At most I've put in a few extra hours due to some rare circumstance a few times per year.

There are better employers out there.

Yeah, subtract 40 hours from a week and you have plenty of free time to do all manner of things.

But if you come home from work and drop down in front of the TV/PC/XBox you'll think there aren't enough hours.

Pretty sure he's done all that in front of a PC.

nice to see the maker culture is alive and well. I need to get back to building some hardware projects in spare time.

I realize now that some people might have mistaken my comment to mean that I'm the person who created the USB-C MIDI synth. I meant that I've been working as a software engineer and have plenty of free time.

Author wrote a rant (self-labelled) on this subject in 2018.

Read https://mitxela.com/rants - head down to the Spare Time and Hard Work heading.

I read the article before it. Absolutely beautiful.

>> The solution is obvious, and any companies that release products in this day and age that inflict on their users the monstrosity that is the firmware update .exe should be ashamed.

I bounced from that to the earring project he mentioned, and I'm just happy this guy exists. I'm strangely happy that he and I go through suffering, too. I've long suspected this is part of the human condition, much like this hackiness (in the best possible sense) is part of the human condition.

Talk about sharing the message instead of the mess. Well done, tiny electronic trinket guy :)

>... accused of having "a lot of spare time". I find this rather offensive.

isn't strong enough to me. Essentially when someone tells you you have "too much free time" they're saying:

"I judge the way that you're spending your time to be completely worthless."

I walk away at that point. We obviously have different priorities and values, and I don't have enough "free time" to want to discuss it with them.

https://mitxela.com/support

i knew a guy who was one of the first digital artists to do patreons, before that he streamed on twitch and had a paypal donation button in his profile

he was easily one of the better artists streaming at any time, but i was still surprised how fast his bills got paid when just a few people started signing up to his subscriptions

when you think about it lump sums, living off your savings seems difficult, but when you can thrive off a monthly amount, the calculus becomes much more do-able (but you have to maintain your audience)

I'm not a hardware person, but I'd say he's living the dream life. Hacking on stuff that he is having fun doing. Not many people could get time off to do it, make a plan and execute it. I love his snarky comments and that he's apparently running some software tool from 1998 in wine on linux.

This project would likely take about 3-5 days at a few hours a day after work for an experienced engineer, including video editing, plus shipping time, and random research here and there on a phone.

It could also be done much faster, but then it would start to feel like work.

The cost could be closer to $50 to someone who had the tools.

If you're willing to use leaded solder paste it might be even cheaper and easier, but I'm sure as heck not.

Dude also has an SMT machine on semi-permanent loan for those tricky jobs :)

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