The blissful Zen of a good side project

This has lead to many, many side projects throughout the years, which I tend to like a zen garden[1]. Pruning, refining, improving, and sometimes rewriting.

As soon as I work out the game mechanics of any game, I just see it as just content now, and there is nothing holding me back to play any longer. Same with watching TV shows or movies, I lose interest pretty quickly and feel an urge to create something.

I've always been very in tune with time, our lack of it, and felt like consumption is a waste of time.

That said I believe creativity is hormonal (that is only my personal belief, unproven). It comes and goes. Some days I can't stop creating, somedays I want netflix and chill. But that's 10 days cycle of sorts, 10 days on, 10 days off.

Depending on where you live, it's perfectly normal that due to current events, or a personal loss in your life, etc. you might not feel the creative bug tickling you. The creative hormone might be totally wiped by your current environment or predicament; tiredness, anger, stress, all play into it.

After all, since our early days in the caves, drawing on walls, Humans wouldn't do so unless they had safety, a full belly, and a warm fire. A place to call home. Creative time needs conditions to be filled.

[1] https://noben.org

Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.

One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.

This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.

I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.

All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.

But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.

- Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS development machines

- Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin UI (learning React/Vite)

- Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home network performance

- Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up my learning and get me unblocked when working on something unfamiliar The freedom to over engineer the shit out of something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to compromise a lot in my day job!

So I ordered a DOCSIS 3.1 modem off amazon, then went and rummaged around in my storage box for an old 2013 macbook air, installed ubuntu server on it, and finally learned how to setup a home router with DHCP, DNS, NAT, firewall, etc. Pihole was a lot of that, and I installed it as a docker container so that was a fun thing to learn to manage as well.

As an aside, ChatGPT made most of this possible. I have used *nix off and on for 25 years but haven't done serious system administration in at least 15 years. ChatGPT is definitely the crutch I needed to get off my ass and do more side projects.

Blissful Zen is a great way to put it.

Story: My mother had 2 of her 3 dogs die on the same day. We buried them in the backyard as we have many little friends before them. This was the first time I dug the graves (my dad had always beared that -- but he passed away last year).

The grave soil was very clay rich. I had recently seen a video on how to reclaim natural clay. It was very rewarding to turn the natural clay into workable clay.

But the real challenge -- how to fire it? I saw guys using charcoal and bricks in their driveway but that can't get hot enough.

So the real Zen has been building an electric kiln from scratch. It is a simple-ish problem with a whole lot of simplish steps. Perfect to keep my mind occupied when it needs to be. I have also learned an amazing amount (about clay, pottery, kilns, Arduino/ESP32, thermocouples, resistance wire, refractory cement, insulation, electrical code, weird soldering techniques, and many more).

First fire will be tomorrow.

Side project is graffiti art on your shed wall, day job is 3 coats gloss white on the ceilings. That needs to be finished by Friday.

I have some side project ideas but need the time! Mainly these would be contributing to OSS databases to get (any!) knowledge of systems proprogramming. Node.js or Go preferred due to familiarity.

At work they rely on me to deliver in a reasonable time, and move on to the next task. Once something is working, it generally isn't changed too much, even to improve it (obviously if it's really important to improve it we make time for that, but that doesn't happen so often)

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the time, space and money to enjoy side projects again. Music, art, coding for the love of making something with no other reason than doing. I stopped thinking anything had to be anything - it just was. I could do for the sake of doing and it was liberating.

I've been very happy about this, it's been a blessing mentally. And very productive. I've enjoyed time and space, and I appreciate (again!) how lucky I am to be here.

Anyways - this article was a good read, and I've enjoyed the observations in the comments - especially about the body and the ebb and flow nature of time spent on side projects.

I had a kind of burn-out last year where I'd work 'til 1am and then feel drained and grouchy the next day. A new found interest in sleep has been paying dividends, but I need to lean into it further.

I find this a rather strange, limited way of looking at our existence.

I believe there is joy in creating. I believe there is joy in just spending time with the people you love. I believe there is joy in exploring new places, people, ideas. I believe there is joy in being still and present.

We are always looking for some singular, defining thing in our lives. What does it all mean. It has to be for something.

But I disagree. It doesn't have to be for anything. It's enough to just do what brings you joy, to evolve and change, to treat others in kindness. The rest is just personal preferences.

My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?

Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I think: non-goal oriented growth.

  Zen is found,
  Not in a project.

  But in desire,
  To quell a need.

  A need born,
  From purity of thought.

  Thought without,
  Encumbrance.

  Thought without,
  Politics.

  Thought without,
  Concern of outcome.

  But in desire,
  To quell a need.

  To find Zen,
  Not from a project.

  But within oneself.

Now I've started a series of interviews with gamers called Unmuted [2], and it gave me some extra motivation to continue to find new people to be interviewed, which is not an easy task.

As a programmer I always had the idea of a side project involving code, but at the end of the day, I don't have the fortitude to code something, and the newsletter has been a great side project to have.

[1] - https://thegamingpub.com/ [2] - https://www.thegamingpub.com/features/unmuted-004-macy-inter...

I'm currenlty juggling a few side projects, one of which is a game I've been tinkering with for 3 years. It's a pretty simple simulation of riding your bike through a city at night. It's never been anywhere near close to anything I could actually release, but I finally at least pulled together a gameplay video I could show off to my familiy and friends. They were all pretty impressed, and all wanted to know when I'd actually release it.

But I doubt I ever will. To me, making the game is my game, and I've tried to frame my side project work to my gamer friends that way. Sometimes it's giving myself new techncial puzzles to figure out, other times it's just letting myself zone out and get creative with world building, snapping together building facades like legos to build whatever crazy city I can imagine. It's so much fun.

Another is a web project that's much less fun and creative, but the more I tinker with it the more it turns into something that may actually be useful to others. And it may actually turn into something I can release and promote, and maybe even earn a little beer money with. I'm currently working up the motivation and courage to do a Show HN on that one here soon.

It almost pains me to say it (for reasons I can't even articulate well) but I've found LLMs to be tremendously useful in pushing through on side project work. I've lost track of how many projects I've spun up over the years and abandoned as soon as I got to the tedious parts you need to tackle if you actually want a marketable product (admin interfaces, user accounts, endless boilerplate html, etc, etc). With a competent LLM I can just delegate all the tedious crap and stay focused on what's actually fun for me. It's great.

Led to my current job, which I love. Hopefully this lasts.

One of them is a years long passion that consists of several, large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I’ll call about the 75% mark.

I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.

My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the span of 2 weeks.

It’s hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator as a baseline.

“Computers are deterministic!” Hah! Not this one!

But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.

The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.

If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.

These two lines really hit home:

> You don’t have to listen to any other voices here, except that quiet one inside of you that’s gently urging you to do the thing you know you need to do.

> You don’t need to know where it’s going to lead. For that matter, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to come of it.

That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right (to me).

I feel like I can only play games that are about 20-50 hours and have a definitive end or game that you can chip away at an hour at a time (e.g. EAFC). Even playing for just a couple hours a night feels like time that could be going towards a side project but time to unwind is important.

"consumption-to-creation ratio" are words i've never put to that positive feeling of choosing to code over watching another TV show or the negative feeling of the alternative choice.

recently i feel like vibe coding is a cheat code in this respect - i can code while watching TV... and a few times the output of the vibe coding exercise was interesting enough to switch to full attention coding.

The other type is much bigger and can take months or even years. New features are added from time to time, but must also fit into a well defined architecture.

Both types can be satisfying but require different approaches. The first gives you a bunch of different projects that get shuffled around and easily abandoned. The second requires more discipline as you continually build upon previous layers.

Since they are both side projects, you can go weeks without looking at them or spend all your spare time on them for extended periods.

I have a side project that I have dabbled with for a decade. There are months where I get many features working and others where I barely look at it. It just depends on what else is happening in my life at the moment.

I know people disparage LLMs for not building any serious code. Yes it's only a hobby project and not a production system, but my little project really would never have left the ground without it.

[0] https://mattsayar.com/i-didnt-want-to-pay-for-a-newsletter-e...

[1] summary by Gemini

If anyone’s curious, I’m happy to send over a free copy—just reply. Always love connecting with others who think deeply about creativity and motivation.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DWM35DXH

I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then

It’s very zen, finally I feel no pressure to make progress, or feel like I’m wasting time by refactoring.

Sometimes I’d spend days just trying to get an animation exactly how I wanted to, or build vanity features entirely because they’re cool.

Everything else I’ve worked on, had aspirations of making money one day, and it quickly becomes a job.

(Working on https://canine.sh)

My last significant side project was the opposite of "blissful". In order to preserve and migrate some important personal data I had to reverse engineer an obsolete, undocumented file format. Then I had to use a confusing and badly documented commercial library to convert the data into a modern file format. I had to figure everything out through trial and error with nearly zero support. It was a frustrating pain in the ass from start to finish and while I'm satisfied with the results I didn't enjoy a minute of it.

None of this was that hard (outside of making it async-friendly, that was a little tricky), but it also wasn't trivial. I had Law and Order on in the background, and I hacked on it for a few days, and it did kind of get me into a "zen state". Figuring out how to make the code more flexible and figuring out which features I can feasibly add was relaxing.

I think part of it was that there's really no consequences to this. If I screw something up, no one is going to be mad at me, no one is going to yell at me, I'm not going to get fired, and I'm allowed to go off onto any tangents that I would like because I'm just doing this for fun. It doesn't feel like "work" because "work" often involves me working on stuff I don't want to work on. If something is too frustrating, I don't have to go through approvals and legal to import a library that does it for me. I can spend as much or as little time as I'd like writing documentation. I can micro-optimize or not-optimize however I'd like.

And fundamentally, if I screw something up, it's the text on the Swaybar, it's really not the end of the world.

It can be tough to find a project that holds my interest enough to get into this. I tend to have the most fun working on stuff that is completely unimportant, because if I'm not trying to change the world, then I can be as creative as I like.

You need to have some agency in your life and being able to pick a project you like and doing it the way you want is vital. Sadly, it's being taken away from us, so reclaim that right !

Love that you added this to the footer on your website. Goodbye ‘organic’ and ‘non-GMO’ and hello ‘AI-Free’ XD

Good for a quick hit of bliss zen when you need it.

---

It reminds me of Yunmen, a monk who lived in China. He was born around 860 A.D. and he lived ninety years. His enlightenment story is a classic:

One day, Yunmen went to visit Mujo. When Mujo heard Yunmen coming, he closed the door to his room. Yunmen knocked on the door. Mujo said, “Who is it?”

Yunmen said, “It’s me.”

Mujo said, “What do you want?”

Yunmen said, “I’m not clear about my life. I’d like the master to give me some instruction.”

Mujo then opened the door, took one look at Yunmen and closed it again.

Yunmen knocked on the door like this for three days in a row. On the third day, when Mujo opened the door, Yunmen stuck his foot in the door. Mujo grabbed Yunmen and yelled, “Speak! Speak!” When Yunmen began to speak, Mujo gave him a shove and said, “Too late.” Mujo slammed the door. Yunmen’s foot was still there, and the slamming door broke Yunmen’s foot. And at that moment, Yunmen was greatly enlightened.

https://emptysqua.re/blog/the-day-yunmen-broke-his-foot/

I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.

I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it, within a year or two I might be able to have enough license revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at that point??)

I burned out on gaming a few years ago. I used to be able to power through weeks of the most inane incremental "game" slop as if it was a voyage to the new world. Now I struggle to force myself to play the most acclaimed AAA titles for 15-20 minutes. I still browse the steam store from time to time, but I finally stopped buying things.

The amount of time I spend on side projects has almost perfectly filled the gap. There have even been a few nights recently where I stayed up very late to watch an experiment unfold. We're talking about staring at a single chart that updates once a second for hours that is getting my heart rate up like a League of Legends game.

I think from a dopamine perspective, you can make a good trade here. The other side can feel even better. It's the transition period that hurts. You've got to get that first tiny bit of traction on the project so it feels like you might eventually have an impact in the world around you. The more it sucks during the first 48 hours, the more likely it will stick indefinitely. When you come back in the morning to a successful experiment run or a good stopping point, it can very quickly snowball into something that rivals the pharmacology of gaming.

> Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? > First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design.

...

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.

Having just finished up a 4-year contracting gig this week, I decided to learn Svelte and recreate a silly little music PoC I made about 15 years ago:

Demo: http://lets-make-sweet-music.com Github: http://github.com/paulbjensen/lets-make-sweet-music

I started making it about 2 days ago - One of my former colleagues even managed to play the Jurassic Park theme song on it for a bit.

What I loved about working on that side project I think is a couple of things:

1 - I could have an idea, implement it, and push it up right away.

This is a breathe of fresh air compared to the coding process at my last gig. The client had a well-structured process of submitting pull requests which required a code review approval before being merged into the codebase.

That process meant that you essentially spent your day picking up tickets and moving them along, and because people wouldn't necessarily be immediately available to perform the code review, the PR could stay open for quite some time.

That delayed feedback loop and hoop-jumping process adds stop-starts into the coding flow state. You can never get into it the same way you can working on a side project.

2 - The tech stack choices are yours to make and quick to do

The tech stack choices used with the client were made by the tech steering committee and your job was essentially to implement the features required by your product team within the parameters of those tech stack choices. They do that to ensure that there is a consistent use of technologies within the company, to the extent that you can quickly swap say frontend engineers from one team to another whenever needed and they can be productive.

On one hand that is great, but on the other hand you don't have the freedom to try new technologies, or even introduce tooling that you feel is better suited for the requirement.

I even had to justify trying to use Sentry rather than ElasticSearch's Kibana for error logging, even though the client was using both tools within the business.

When you are working on the side project, you can make choices and decisions far quicker and easier - the feedback loop is just much quicker and progress happens faster.

3 - The scope of your input into the side project is far greater

When I worked with the client, I was effectively working as a frontend engineer, because they had a gap in a product team to fill.

However, my skills and experience in my career extended to being a full-stack developer who also liked to work on design work in Sketch and even knew how to deploy to VPS, not just work with a PaaS.

When you don't get to use those skills daily in your client work, they will wither, and you can end up becoming pigeon-holed and institutionalised into a narrow way-of-working, which is a danger to being able to apply the full extent of your capabilities.

So the side projects end up serving as a way to exercise those underused skills. Especially if you relish having creative freedom, which reminds me of something that Paul Graham said about developers - they don't do it necessarily for the money - they do it to have creative freedom.

I haven't found the link to the video, but he touches on it a bit in this post: https://www.paulgraham.com/really.html