It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I'm wasting time.
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.
I find that due to having a remote job and living alone (albeit with my lovely dog) I'm less inclined to work on a side project where I'm again alone. I tend to gravitate more nowadays to spending time with people and being outdoors.
I used to be really active on side projects when I was a teacher. I'd have my social interaction filled to the brim so side projects were a way to have some alone time and recharge.
Yeah, I've noticed that when I have lots of stressors, I don't have any creative energy. I have to give myself permission to let go, that it's ok to forget about a side project. It's more important to focus on self-care and tackling irl problems at that point.
But when life is good, it's hard to stop tinkering. Weekend-sized projects are the best. For me, it's an urge to create and see the core 20% come to life, not to maintain the boring parts over time.
Hormonal fluctuations is an interesting theory. I always thought it's just a need for variety -- sometimes consuming (i.e. developing taste, curating, exploring), sometimes creating, sometimes relaxing. For me the cycle is months at a time.
One of the hallmarks of people who get stressed, and especially people with burnout is that they don’t have any creative or any relaxive or active outlet anymore. They get kind of stuck in their stressloop.
Say a people who enjoyed playing an instrument stops playing, etc.
The best companies I worked allowed for a bit of game/social activity between work sessions.
My current problem is that I feel like I’m only barely managing to not completely burn out via relaxation at night. I used to have a ton of excitement over my side project, but for the past several months, I can’t muster the energy. I play a board game on Steam (Wingspan: 10/10 would recommend the physical and digital version) that has a soundtrack I like, and that’s about it. This keeps me sane, but I often find myself wishing I felt confident enough to extend myself further.
Hopefully when my current large work project wraps up I’ll be able to take a breather.
I played this computer game "eliza" by zachtronics and it had this very interesting solitaire mini-game inside it. I liked it so much I bought the zachtronics solitaire collection. And wow, I would launch it "between things" for a moment and it could easily spin the clock forward an hour or more.
I had to delete it from my computer.
I think there are some things you have to just say no to and go through the pain of making yourself bored so something better will fill in.
I’ve noticed this trend in my life where during winter times my consumption goes way up and as soon as spring time is here then my creativity crawls back from hibernation and I quickly regain motivation to continue my side projects. I wish I could be 100% focus year round but for some reason it very hard to keep the inner flame of creativity going during winter times. At least I did noticed this pattern and being aware is the first step to remedy this problem.
Oh wow! I’ve noticed a definitely cycle to my creativity as well definitely correlated with stress. I’ve never thought about hormonal changes. I’ve recently started taking lots vitamins and keeping track of my motivation via a spreadsheet each day. No conclusions yet, but I’m curious to see what will show up
I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment.
Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious about what I should be doing with my time instead.
I'm also like this. Some part of me feels that any moment spent not honing a skill / advancing in some way is a wasted one. I know it's a bs perspective, but still I find myself taking it constantly.
I do manage to force myself out of this way of thinking from time to time, but it requires conscious effort to do so.
I imagine this forum has its fair share of people who fall for this "overachiever fallacy". I'd be curious to hear how others deal with it.
For the longest time I railed against the fact that I am mortal, and my time is finite. I wanted to squeeze everything I could into my days, and I would feel guilty about projects I didn’t get to. This is despite having a wife, kids, house, full time job.
Eventually I burned out on programming-based side projects. I switched to activities that do not require staring at a screen. So I build analog electronics, study music.
Then I had a heart attack. My mortality and the fragility of life was never more clear. I accepted that I could die, and let go of all the mental baggage I was holding onto.
I’ve felt ‘cured’ ever since. I don’t recommend anyone get a heart attack. But I do think people fall into patterns, and get stuck inside of them. Sometimes a “pattern interrupter” can break us out.
I had that mindset, but then an overwhelming amount of personal and work stress made me change. Unfortunately, as I wrote in a comment further up, now I feel like I’m too far on the other side, where all I do after work is relax.
If anyone has suggestions on striking a balance, I’d love to hear them.
I share the experience of all 4 parents of this comment. It turned out I had undiagnosed ADHD. After diagnosis all my life suddenly made sense. Before the diagnosis, my situation had progressed to a point I’d get burnout by just everyday life, let alone work. Everything was overwhelming. Treatment turned my life around.
Later, I found out I have autism too - many autistic people “mask” around other people, altering their behavior to hide autistic traits. This is another thing causing (temporary) burnout after being around people.
In terms of side projects, I’ve deliberately curated a smaller set that meets multiple criteria. Social connection, simplicity and elegance, and the ability to start and stop at will.
At work I am always looking for ways to do more than one thing at once. Learn a new skill. Teach something. Solve a small problem. Make myself feel good. Take the solution to the next level.
I think it’s okay to want to always be honing and advancing. Humans are always seeking lower energy paths. Maybe you just need to expand the scope of the skills you’re seeking. One of the most valuable skills in my work is the ability to stop and think about what I’m actually trying to do. That is honed through stopping and observing (meditation).
I'll say LLMs have influenced this for me. I've lost some part of what made programming "interesting".
Sure, digging through docs and finding small-scale workable examples to for boillerplate/whatever was never fun, but a lot of what drew me to programming was the wading into the unknown and the satisfaction of figuring things out (often even "chore" type things).
I'll keep looking for a new hobby, I guess.
Related, I feel like programming jobs are on the way out, one way or another (at least for me); programming recreationally had the side benefit of increasing marketable skill--this was never a primary or even secondary motivator for me, but now seeing as it's benefit in that realm seems far smaller, I've also lost motivation there.
Maybe I'll feel a bit better as the weather improves.
for me i figured out it’s about the body. it’s ok to be lifted up from the body into the thinking mind but i “owe” my body to spend some time there as well.
sometimes all it takes is sitting 20min in the morning just observing sensations in my body, and saying good morning to various organs haha. sounds silly but creates a solid foundation for my day.
You may have adhd. This is how I am. I can’t relax ever, I have to be constantly moving mentally or physically, I have to make the most of every moment. It’s an adhd thing, and medication does help with this. Worth getting yourself checked
If you are very analytical, a good call is to learn a different way of being, call it “acceptance mode”
If you look at techniques employed from modern buddhism / zen, where you just learn to settle into present (breath, sensory experiences etc.) you can learn to shift your mind from analysis to acceptance modes.
We have finite time, self-actualization through creation is very human. Too much passive consumption is sleepwalking through life.
However, creators often forget that mental exercise is like physical, you don't sprint 24/7 you have to pace intensity whether it's running or writing Clojure.
I'm in the same boat. Ever since I started working professionally, I was always praised for delivering first, and it shows in how I work. I'm a maker, I love to deliver. I have a few side projects as well, a few that are relatively completed and I haven't even deployed them, because they were just fun to build. Some are deployed, and I enjoy polishing them.
On the other hand, I remember that time you enjoy wasting is not a wasted time. I don't sleep well if I don't just chill and forget about the world, from time to time. It's like in the Sims. I aim towards my creativity and entertainment need bars to be filled. While coding, I often increase the fill of both bars.
Have you tried League of Legends or Valorant? I'm like you as I can't not have multiple side projects going on at any time, but at the same time there is so much room to improve in these kinds of game I find them hard to stop at times.
I'm somewhat the same way as parent, getting bored once I figured out the mechanics. While I haven't tried League of Legends, I have tried Valorant, and generally the type of games that is more about mastery of a skill rather than discovery, exploration, story or problem-solving, gets boring fast for me at least.
I get the same feeling that I'm "not being productive" while playing video games, watching tv, etc that seems to kill any enjoyment from doing these things.
For me learning piano has been a great alternative to programming in the off hours (typing is quite transferrable too!). Highly recommend if you're like me on screens all day.
I wonder if it's always a zero day. I think that things and ways of thinking create momentum. The more you netflix and chill, the likelier you are to netflix and chill.
Yeah I definitely struggle with this. You need downtime to relax but it's easy to "over relax" just like it's easy to oversleep or overeat or overdo any other number of things that are healthy and necessary but only at the right amplitude and frequency. I think that's why it can feel so good to be in a rhythm. You get a nice oscillation going that rides the wave of momentum instead of some monotonic rise or fall that is going to lead to burnout or stagnation.
In my case it's somewhat of a learned behavior, a lot of my favorite video games make me violently motion sick so over time I just stopped playing them.
Most TV is pretty boring IMO. There's always exceptions but it's not something I find myself regularly being drawn to.
I'm always tinkering on something (a longtime favorite is gardening), and I'm pretty sure I'll always be tinkering until the day I die. Some of us are just wired differently.
Can be a little difficult to connect with the mainstream folks though. I pretty much live in a different world.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
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.
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)
I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS
My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other, more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps that people have made.
Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that come to mind:
- Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show you which are new to you, and which you have as flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in a vocab listing
- Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards passively as you read and encounter them naturally
- Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki including AnkiMobile on iOS
- One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from starting boundary
- Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-capable tool
I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB
I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not an iOS/macOS app
I should put up some product comparison material as there are a lot of tools out there
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you.
Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I'm really not sure: it's highly specialized to scrape the pages of that particular course and output it in my own HTML and CSS classes. Luckily for me, their format is quite standard across chapters, but may not be across courses, and I didn't write the code to be modular or adaptive given my need (and the fact that I'm learning Python, not application design).
Still, the code lives in a git repo, so it's not excluded that I'll make it evolve to something more generic and maintainable in the future. But today, it's my own little dirty code that I will jealously keep and hide like that lewd drawing I did when I was a teenager.
I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.
Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a sanctuary
You can tell my engagement level with my job by the commit frequency on my side-project.
If I'm deeply engaged at work, I don't have many spare cycles out of hours and there's little happening - library updates and small fiddling.
Otherwise - it's full steam ahead on projects that I somehow magically find the time for.
I don't work on my stuff during work hours - disengagement from work results in more energy and motivation to do stuff out of hours.
Weirdly, I think this actually benefits those boring workplaces too.
If I'm scratching the itch with what I'm doing on my side-project - it means I'm less likely to invent interesting new ways to over-complicate things at work.
My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code.
It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects.
In the last three months I have:
- Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).
- 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!
> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)
I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.
How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?
Final assembly was recent, but it took months of planning and research, mainly around being sure the components would fit in the tight tolerances of the FormD 2.1 9.95L case.
I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up around the GPU. For the first build, it took me probably a full day, but now I can strip and rebuild it in around an hour or two.
Also, the case - I had my heart set on the 2.1 case not the 2.5, since the 2.1 was a labor of love from the OG designer - It took freaking months to get my hands on the Titanium + Black version. My recommendation would be to favorite it on the Shopify store, and hit order the second you get the back in stock notification, they sell out in an hour or two.
I still screwed up my planning and had to get my custom cables remade to be shorter to give me more space, and had to deshroud my GPU to make it fit at the same time as the I/O headers.
I ordered both an air cooler and the AIO I now use, and tried both, in the end, I went for the AIO (accepting the higher GPU temps due to the radiator at the top), because I don't game as much and I want the 9950X3D to not throttle when doing Rust builds and other things that peg all cores at 100, and I didn't want to undervolt.
I can run the 4090 at full power, the PSU I have does amazingly well (Corsair SF750 SFX). However, I am switching it out for an SF1000 SFX soon, to give it a little more headroom, if I max out the CPU (170W TDP) and GPU (450W TDP), along with the other components, I am approaching the limits of the SF750, and it definitely couldn't handle a 5090 (a future project!).
Temperature wise, the 4090 maxes out at 60-70C for the games I play, and the CPU maxes out at around 80C for all-core workloads, idling at around 50C.
Not as good as a big ass desktop, but I came from a big ass desktop and I love this tiny dense powerhouse that is 6x smaller than my Fractal North XL predecessor :)
Thank you for sharing, I'm gonna save this comment and come back to it. I'm in Vietnam and chose this case partly because it seems resellers do have it in stock here. It's all the other stuff - custom risers and cables - I'm worried about.
I'm gonna target a 4080/5080 - stuck with Nvidia because CUDA - which gives me a lot more wiggle room with the power supply.
I've built plenty of PCs, including a few SFF PCs without GPUs, but never something requiring this kind of customization so I'm planning to find a detailed build online and mostly copy what the other person did, if possible.
If you go for the 4080 or 5080, you will have a lot more options for sure. If you can find one, I would try get a 2/2.5 slot wide card, gives you so much more flexibility.
You want a GPU no longer than 325mm (though exactly 325mm may be pushing it).
For the 4090 it was basically Founder's Edition or my card. FE was impossible to source (I am not in the USA), and I had to get the MSI card specially ordered in, the most common card was the ASUS ROG monster which at 357mm would never fit.
At 322mm, the MSI card barely fits (after deshrouding), there is like 2-3mm to spare length-wise. And you have to build in 3 slot mode if you want any clearance from the PSU (mount PSU on standoffs).
Before deshrouding, the GPU plastic covers mean you can't also plug in the USB-C I/O port.
Oh yeah, forgot about the riser cable.
The one that comes with the FormD case is serviceable, but depending on the motherboard. I believe it has issues with Gigabyte B760 and B650 motherboards.
So I had to go back to the stock cable for the AIO flavor build, which has other issues (you have to fold it/squash it a bit at the bottom where it bends around below the motherboard, so that pressure on it doesn't cause it to make it pop out of the motherboard connector). Before you put on the bottom cover with the feet on it, the riser will touch the surface of whatever you are building on, and given enough time can cause the motherboard connector to loosen or pop out.
Had hours of debugging fun trying to figure out why it was starting to lock up while gaming, turned out to be the riser having wiggled loose from the motherboard.
My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi network onto my router so that their cell customers would get more wifi coverage or something.
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.
As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that
Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32, getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and...
So yeah, it enables my brain to just chase the inspiration rabbit without getting too bogged down in infrastructure.
Vibe coding is not using a chat interface to explore an unfamiliar domain like GP describes, it's letting an agent tool like Cursor or Goose do most of the work semi-independently.
Vibe coding is not looking at the code, essentially. See what Simon Willison has written about it (the original term was coined[0] by Andrej Karpathy): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project way.
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).
A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)
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.
Great metaphor but I feel like my day job is graffiti style crap code that just barely passes QA while all of my side project code is the good good 3 coats of SW superpaint
I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting until I'm happy.
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)
I think it's nice to be able to write something well, polished and sturdy. Something better than at work. higher ideals.
Or, to write something that is house of cards nonsense that would never fly at work but does something fun. You don't have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is the BEST.
I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.
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.
I'm in my 50s and I'm currently mulling the conundrum of being an artist and designer with art and design side projects, and now having them sidelined by a new-found interest in p5js. I'm getting little glimpses of observing myself and how I'm responding to my side-project time being increasingly compacted by parenting, work and also a recent flush of training for a mountain run (in order to maintain some fitness) - I also had a temporary obsession with learning wheelies on my bike, which further compacted time available for javascript learning outside of work hours.
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 think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.
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.
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.
Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.
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.
I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.
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.
There's nothing more euphoric to me than working on a good project which I thought of as an idea and watching it turn real. I can work on it all day and not feel tired.. in the zone, meditating.. building.
The interesting thing with my side projects is that they are ever so close to being a full-on business, but they are slightly under the threshold where I could go all in (stay at home wife, three kids, American healthcare costs). So, it’s hard to think of them as “side” projects when in reality they’ve become a “side” business. It’s like I have no choice but to take them a bit seriously, though I do hope to find the time for a “love of the game” side project. Great post.
I’m a bit behind where you are with my side businesses, and the way I feel about them is more acutely aware of the time tradeoff I have to make to work on them.
To side hustle on my job board, I have to give up hanging out with my kid.
That’s just not a trade I’ve felt like making recently.
On top of that, I just changed jobs, and got a very appreciable salary bump for it. It makes the grind of the side business seem pretty paltry in comparison: the returns on my main career track are just so much bigger thanks to my compounding experience and skill there.
> I’ve spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with that approach.
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.
This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.
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 there are two kinds of side projects. One type is a small project that can be coded up in a short time (a weekend or a few evenings). It reaches a functional stage rather quickly and only takes a few hours to fix bugs or improve the user experience.
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 love this, and yes can completely relate. The last side project I got absorbed into[0] completely consumed me for a weekend. I was driven like a man possessed to finish it before Monday. I had to leave the house and stake out a corner in a coffee shop to concentrate. The scope of the project was perfect: it was small enough to do in a weekend, I was building something I needed, and something that could help others. Creating something is so much fun, especially when you have a long-lasting way to share it like your own website.
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.
I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have in my career came because my side projects were interesting and sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's so much specialization in our era – being able to connect dots across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a superpower.
"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.
I like to have side projects that end in a blog post. So many people never share side projects because they are going for perfection and give up on the way, but if the end result is not code or a product I find it more enjoyable to work on. Like have a vision of what you want to explore and focus on that.
Most of my creation is done at work now, previously more balanced outside of work with side projects but with little kids a more demanding job its hard, so outside work time is more consumption, though some of that is social consumption which I feel has value (pub, gaming).
I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]
Really enjoying this thread, especially the points about creative cycles and the connection between stress and our drive to create. I recently wrote a book that dives into some of this, blending behavioral psychology with mindset principles like the law of attraction. It’s all about how our habits, thoughts, and environment shape our ability to stay inspired and follow through on projects.
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.
I've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well.
A lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.
I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then
I’ve finally gotten to a place in my life financially where I don’t care as much about the potential of making money from side projects and get to just build what I find interesting with the care and attention that I’ve always wanted.
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.
It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good".
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.
Said it before and will say it again : side project are the antidote to burnout.
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 !
I had a lot of fun overengineering the hell out of the status bar in Sway recently. It was something that I got working in fifteen minutes in Bash, and then ended up rewriting in Clojure, then figuring out how to get working with GraalVM, and then just kept adding features and making it more customizable.
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.
A million years ago (in the age of “made in Dreamweaver” badges on web sites) I had a dumb little ball-and-stick image of adenosine triphosphate and I made a dumb little “made with ATP” badge, because I typed out html with plain-vanilla vim.
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.
I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.
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’ve spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with that approach.
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.
It reminded me a part of the "The Tar Pit" esssay from The Mythical Man-month:
> 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.
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.
"The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements."
Documentation quality has been the determining factor in the evolution of my side projects. I've developed a structured documentation system that has completely transformed my workflow with AI assistants.
I think that's often the thing that kills my side projects. I'll make reasonable progress, lose interest for a bit, and then when I come back to it all the working memory is gone and so I spend a few hours just getting up to speed again. Better ongoing documentation to allow quicker self-onboarding is what I need!
I've had reasonable success with taking diary-style notes on whatever project I'm working on within that project's page in Obsidian, and then when I need to come back to it, either reading over it or passing it through a LLM to summarise / ask me targeted questions to prod my memory.
It's an interesting read. I'm in the complete opposite camp. I can't pick up a game controller for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I'm wasting time.
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
I find that due to having a remote job and living alone (albeit with my lovely dog) I'm less inclined to work on a side project where I'm again alone. I tend to gravitate more nowadays to spending time with people and being outdoors.
I used to be really active on side projects when I was a teacher. I'd have my social interaction filled to the brim so side projects were a way to have some alone time and recharge.
Sports is a great way to achieve that
Yeah, I've noticed that when I have lots of stressors, I don't have any creative energy. I have to give myself permission to let go, that it's ok to forget about a side project. It's more important to focus on self-care and tackling irl problems at that point.
But when life is good, it's hard to stop tinkering. Weekend-sized projects are the best. For me, it's an urge to create and see the core 20% come to life, not to maintain the boring parts over time.
Hormonal fluctuations is an interesting theory. I always thought it's just a need for variety -- sometimes consuming (i.e. developing taste, curating, exploring), sometimes creating, sometimes relaxing. For me the cycle is months at a time.
One of the hallmarks of people who get stressed, and especially people with burnout is that they don’t have any creative or any relaxive or active outlet anymore. They get kind of stuck in their stressloop.
Say a people who enjoyed playing an instrument stops playing, etc.
The best companies I worked allowed for a bit of game/social activity between work sessions.
My current problem is that I feel like I’m only barely managing to not completely burn out via relaxation at night. I used to have a ton of excitement over my side project, but for the past several months, I can’t muster the energy. I play a board game on Steam (Wingspan: 10/10 would recommend the physical and digital version) that has a soundtrack I like, and that’s about it. This keeps me sane, but I often find myself wishing I felt confident enough to extend myself further.
Hopefully when my current large work project wraps up I’ll be able to take a breather.
wingspan is on my wishlist.
I played this computer game "eliza" by zachtronics and it had this very interesting solitaire mini-game inside it. I liked it so much I bought the zachtronics solitaire collection. And wow, I would launch it "between things" for a moment and it could easily spin the clock forward an hour or more.
I had to delete it from my computer.
I think there are some things you have to just say no to and go through the pain of making yourself bored so something better will fill in.
I think wingspan may remain on my wishlist :)
I’ve noticed this trend in my life where during winter times my consumption goes way up and as soon as spring time is here then my creativity crawls back from hibernation and I quickly regain motivation to continue my side projects. I wish I could be 100% focus year round but for some reason it very hard to keep the inner flame of creativity going during winter times. At least I did noticed this pattern and being aware is the first step to remedy this problem.
In some ways we are just like plants. Direct exposure to fresh air and sunlight will greatly contribute to a burst of energy and focus.
Oh wow! I’ve noticed a definitely cycle to my creativity as well definitely correlated with stress. I’ve never thought about hormonal changes. I’ve recently started taking lots vitamins and keeping track of my motivation via a spreadsheet each day. No conclusions yet, but I’m curious to see what will show up
I'm the same, and it has kind of ruined me. No one I know thinks the ways I do. I keep wondering if it's just due to anxiety or a fear of death, or an inability to feel present or what. But I really wish I could figure this aspect of myself out so that I can relax and enjoy in a moment.
Whenever I realize that I was lost a moment, I get anxious about what I should be doing with my time instead.
I'm also like this. Some part of me feels that any moment spent not honing a skill / advancing in some way is a wasted one. I know it's a bs perspective, but still I find myself taking it constantly. I do manage to force myself out of this way of thinking from time to time, but it requires conscious effort to do so.
I imagine this forum has its fair share of people who fall for this "overachiever fallacy". I'd be curious to hear how others deal with it.
For the longest time I railed against the fact that I am mortal, and my time is finite. I wanted to squeeze everything I could into my days, and I would feel guilty about projects I didn’t get to. This is despite having a wife, kids, house, full time job.
Eventually I burned out on programming-based side projects. I switched to activities that do not require staring at a screen. So I build analog electronics, study music.
Then I had a heart attack. My mortality and the fragility of life was never more clear. I accepted that I could die, and let go of all the mental baggage I was holding onto.
I’ve felt ‘cured’ ever since. I don’t recommend anyone get a heart attack. But I do think people fall into patterns, and get stuck inside of them. Sometimes a “pattern interrupter” can break us out.
I had that mindset, but then an overwhelming amount of personal and work stress made me change. Unfortunately, as I wrote in a comment further up, now I feel like I’m too far on the other side, where all I do after work is relax.
If anyone has suggestions on striking a balance, I’d love to hear them.
I share the experience of all 4 parents of this comment. It turned out I had undiagnosed ADHD. After diagnosis all my life suddenly made sense. Before the diagnosis, my situation had progressed to a point I’d get burnout by just everyday life, let alone work. Everything was overwhelming. Treatment turned my life around.
Later, I found out I have autism too - many autistic people “mask” around other people, altering their behavior to hide autistic traits. This is another thing causing (temporary) burnout after being around people.
LOL yes. I have diagnosed and treated ADHD, and my therapist suspects (but it is currently undiagnosed) that I am autistic. Super fun times.
In terms of side projects, I’ve deliberately curated a smaller set that meets multiple criteria. Social connection, simplicity and elegance, and the ability to start and stop at will.
At work I am always looking for ways to do more than one thing at once. Learn a new skill. Teach something. Solve a small problem. Make myself feel good. Take the solution to the next level.
I think it’s okay to want to always be honing and advancing. Humans are always seeking lower energy paths. Maybe you just need to expand the scope of the skills you’re seeking. One of the most valuable skills in my work is the ability to stop and think about what I’m actually trying to do. That is honed through stopping and observing (meditation).
I'm in the same boat.
I'll say LLMs have influenced this for me. I've lost some part of what made programming "interesting".
Sure, digging through docs and finding small-scale workable examples to for boillerplate/whatever was never fun, but a lot of what drew me to programming was the wading into the unknown and the satisfaction of figuring things out (often even "chore" type things).
I'll keep looking for a new hobby, I guess.
Related, I feel like programming jobs are on the way out, one way or another (at least for me); programming recreationally had the side benefit of increasing marketable skill--this was never a primary or even secondary motivator for me, but now seeing as it's benefit in that realm seems far smaller, I've also lost motivation there.
Maybe I'll feel a bit better as the weather improves.
for me i figured out it’s about the body. it’s ok to be lifted up from the body into the thinking mind but i “owe” my body to spend some time there as well.
sometimes all it takes is sitting 20min in the morning just observing sensations in my body, and saying good morning to various organs haha. sounds silly but creates a solid foundation for my day.
Whenever I feel like I'm losing time, I go watch this and I feel much better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZbfNtDCHdM
That's a very funny video! I'm curious to see if I can get my swim club to do something like this :-)
You may have adhd. This is how I am. I can’t relax ever, I have to be constantly moving mentally or physically, I have to make the most of every moment. It’s an adhd thing, and medication does help with this. Worth getting yourself checked
If you are very analytical, a good call is to learn a different way of being, call it “acceptance mode”
If you look at techniques employed from modern buddhism / zen, where you just learn to settle into present (breath, sensory experiences etc.) you can learn to shift your mind from analysis to acceptance modes.
The fear of death is a strong motivator (or demotivator), so that could be it.
Ever since I truly realised how I feel about dying, I have had to willingly put myself to take a break and play games once in a while. It gets better!
We have finite time, self-actualization through creation is very human. Too much passive consumption is sleepwalking through life.
However, creators often forget that mental exercise is like physical, you don't sprint 24/7 you have to pace intensity whether it's running or writing Clojure.
I'm in the same boat. Ever since I started working professionally, I was always praised for delivering first, and it shows in how I work. I'm a maker, I love to deliver. I have a few side projects as well, a few that are relatively completed and I haven't even deployed them, because they were just fun to build. Some are deployed, and I enjoy polishing them.
On the other hand, I remember that time you enjoy wasting is not a wasted time. I don't sleep well if I don't just chill and forget about the world, from time to time. It's like in the Sims. I aim towards my creativity and entertainment need bars to be filled. While coding, I often increase the fill of both bars.
Have you tried League of Legends or Valorant? I'm like you as I can't not have multiple side projects going on at any time, but at the same time there is so much room to improve in these kinds of game I find them hard to stop at times.
I'm somewhat the same way as parent, getting bored once I figured out the mechanics. While I haven't tried League of Legends, I have tried Valorant, and generally the type of games that is more about mastery of a skill rather than discovery, exploration, story or problem-solving, gets boring fast for me at least.
I get the same feeling that I'm "not being productive" while playing video games, watching tv, etc that seems to kill any enjoyment from doing these things.
For me learning piano has been a great alternative to programming in the off hours (typing is quite transferrable too!). Highly recommend if you're like me on screens all day.
I wish I could be more like you in this regard. Perhaps you're right about the "creative hormone" thing.
> somedays I want netflix and chill.
I call them a zero day.
I wonder if it's always a zero day. I think that things and ways of thinking create momentum. The more you netflix and chill, the likelier you are to netflix and chill.
Yeah I definitely struggle with this. You need downtime to relax but it's easy to "over relax" just like it's easy to oversleep or overeat or overdo any other number of things that are healthy and necessary but only at the right amplitude and frequency. I think that's why it can feel so good to be in a rhythm. You get a nice oscillation going that rides the wave of momentum instead of some monotonic rise or fall that is going to lead to burnout or stagnation.
How are your in the opposite camp of an article encouraging side projects when you say you have many side projects?
The author wrote about long periods of time when he wasn't encouraged to make anything creative, and just consume.
You're definitely not alone.
In my case it's somewhat of a learned behavior, a lot of my favorite video games make me violently motion sick so over time I just stopped playing them.
Most TV is pretty boring IMO. There's always exceptions but it's not something I find myself regularly being drawn to.
I'm always tinkering on something (a longtime favorite is gardening), and I'm pretty sure I'll always be tinkering until the day I die. Some of us are just wired differently.
Can be a little difficult to connect with the mainstream folks though. I pretty much live in a different world.
Thankfully the long tail of the Internet means there is a world you can connect to.
This is how I am except with nostalgia content, which I cannot see as just content.
It is however impossible for me to play the latest games or watch the latest shows for 10 minutes without feeling like my time is being wasted.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
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.
> I decided to go for Python
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
What type of job does sales of Anki decks? I never though this to be have like a market, so curious to know
https://refold.la/category/decks/
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)
I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS
My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other, more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps that people have made.
Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that come to mind:
- Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show you which are new to you, and which you have as flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in a vocab listing
- Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards passively as you read and encounter them naturally
- Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki including AnkiMobile on iOS
- One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from starting boundary
- Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-capable tool
I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB
I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not an iOS/macOS app
I should put up some product comparison material as there are a lot of tools out there
Ah I didn't realize you also had a macOS app out! Also cool to see you're on HN! I honestly love the niche that we're in.
Hi! Maybe you saw my old app before I rewrote it fully in SwiftUI. Yes it's a nice supportive community to be in
I like to do this!
Here's one I made for British Sign Language by scraping signbsl.com: https://github.com/sandbach/bsl-gcse
And an Arabic one by scraping Reverso: https://github.com/sandbach/arabic_vocabulary
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you. Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I'm really not sure: it's highly specialized to scrape the pages of that particular course and output it in my own HTML and CSS classes. Luckily for me, their format is quite standard across chapters, but may not be across courses, and I didn't write the code to be modular or adaptive given my need (and the fact that I'm learning Python, not application design).
Still, the code lives in a git repo, so it's not excluded that I'll make it evolve to something more generic and maintainable in the future. But today, it's my own little dirty code that I will jealously keep and hide like that lewd drawing I did when I was a teenager.
I feel this in my bones. Side projects are so cathartic and saved my sanity at $DAYJOB. I don't care that I can't implement things the way I want, or how everything is spaghetti, or how much tech debt has piled up, my side projects is a blissful world that I invented. It gives me the "I am Jack's crap codebase" fight club zen at work.
Yeah. There is something about carving out the image of your own mind and getting absorbed deep inside it. I will write from scratch much more than I need if it strikes me, break whatever rule I want, give names that only make sense to me. It is a sanctuary
You can tell my engagement level with my job by the commit frequency on my side-project.
If I'm deeply engaged at work, I don't have many spare cycles out of hours and there's little happening - library updates and small fiddling.
Otherwise - it's full steam ahead on projects that I somehow magically find the time for.
I don't work on my stuff during work hours - disengagement from work results in more energy and motivation to do stuff out of hours.
Weirdly, I think this actually benefits those boring workplaces too. If I'm scratching the itch with what I'm doing on my side-project - it means I'm less likely to invent interesting new ways to over-complicate things at work.
My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code. It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).
- 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!
> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)
I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.
How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?
Final assembly was recent, but it took months of planning and research, mainly around being sure the components would fit in the tight tolerances of the FormD 2.1 9.95L case.
I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up around the GPU. For the first build, it took me probably a full day, but now I can strip and rebuild it in around an hour or two.
Also, the case - I had my heart set on the 2.1 case not the 2.5, since the 2.1 was a labor of love from the OG designer - It took freaking months to get my hands on the Titanium + Black version. My recommendation would be to favorite it on the Shopify store, and hit order the second you get the back in stock notification, they sell out in an hour or two.
I still screwed up my planning and had to get my custom cables remade to be shorter to give me more space, and had to deshroud my GPU to make it fit at the same time as the I/O headers.
I ordered both an air cooler and the AIO I now use, and tried both, in the end, I went for the AIO (accepting the higher GPU temps due to the radiator at the top), because I don't game as much and I want the 9950X3D to not throttle when doing Rust builds and other things that peg all cores at 100, and I didn't want to undervolt.
I can run the 4090 at full power, the PSU I have does amazingly well (Corsair SF750 SFX). However, I am switching it out for an SF1000 SFX soon, to give it a little more headroom, if I max out the CPU (170W TDP) and GPU (450W TDP), along with the other components, I am approaching the limits of the SF750, and it definitely couldn't handle a 5090 (a future project!).
Temperature wise, the 4090 maxes out at 60-70C for the games I play, and the CPU maxes out at around 80C for all-core workloads, idling at around 50C.
Not as good as a big ass desktop, but I came from a big ass desktop and I love this tiny dense powerhouse that is 6x smaller than my Fractal North XL predecessor :)
Photo (Logitech MX Master mouse for scale): https://imgur.com/a/lcS98IE
Best resources for this was the /r/FormD and /r/sffpc subreddits and Discord.
Parts list:
- CPU: AMD 9950X3D (originally a spare 7800X3D, 9950X3D was a recent swap-out)
- GPU: MSI Ventus 3X RTX 4090
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG X870-I (originally X670E-I)
- Memory: G-Skill Trident Z CL30 DDR6000 32GB (x2)
- SSD: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (x2)
- PSU: Corsair SF750
- Cooling Option 1 (not used): Thermalright AXP90-X47 (Full Copper)
- Cooling Option 2: CoolerMaster Atmos 240 AIO
- Custom cabling: Ordered from DreambigbyRayMOD on Etsy
- GPU deshrouding kit: Ordered from Osserva on Etsy
- Fans: All Noctua for quieter noise profiles
- Case: FormD T1 2.1 Titanium + CNC machined black side panels
Thank you for sharing, I'm gonna save this comment and come back to it. I'm in Vietnam and chose this case partly because it seems resellers do have it in stock here. It's all the other stuff - custom risers and cables - I'm worried about.
I'm gonna target a 4080/5080 - stuck with Nvidia because CUDA - which gives me a lot more wiggle room with the power supply.
I've built plenty of PCs, including a few SFF PCs without GPUs, but never something requiring this kind of customization so I'm planning to find a detailed build online and mostly copy what the other person did, if possible.
If you go for the 4080 or 5080, you will have a lot more options for sure. If you can find one, I would try get a 2/2.5 slot wide card, gives you so much more flexibility.
Bookmark this Excel, saves you a lot of time looking up specs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AddRvGWJ_f4B6UC7_Ift...
You want a GPU no longer than 325mm (though exactly 325mm may be pushing it).
For the 4090 it was basically Founder's Edition or my card. FE was impossible to source (I am not in the USA), and I had to get the MSI card specially ordered in, the most common card was the ASUS ROG monster which at 357mm would never fit.
At 322mm, the MSI card barely fits (after deshrouding), there is like 2-3mm to spare length-wise. And you have to build in 3 slot mode if you want any clearance from the PSU (mount PSU on standoffs).
Before deshrouding, the GPU plastic covers mean you can't also plug in the USB-C I/O port.
Oh yeah, forgot about the riser cable.
The one that comes with the FormD case is serviceable, but depending on the motherboard. I believe it has issues with Gigabyte B760 and B650 motherboards.
I also have the LinkUp 19mm PCIe 5.0 V2 riser cable (https://linkup.one/linkup-ava5-pcie-5-0-riser-cable-future-p...), but it can only be used in air-cooled builds - it has a red tab at the top which blocks the radiator if you want to use it with watercooled/AIOs. See this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/1f5ij02/question_re_.... Some brave souls have hacked off the tab with a knife/scissors but you have to be careful not to cut the wires along with it :)
So I had to go back to the stock cable for the AIO flavor build, which has other issues (you have to fold it/squash it a bit at the bottom where it bends around below the motherboard, so that pressure on it doesn't cause it to make it pop out of the motherboard connector). Before you put on the bottom cover with the feet on it, the riser will touch the surface of whatever you are building on, and given enough time can cause the motherboard connector to loosen or pop out.
Had hours of debugging fun trying to figure out why it was starting to lock up while gaming, turned out to be the riser having wiggled loose from the motherboard.
Whoa. All that since Jan 1? Inspiring!
The PC build took months of planning, but yeah, I've been on a tear since the December break!
My latest side project started a couple weeks ago when I received an email from Cox that they would be forcing an unmanageable wifi network onto my router so that their cell customers would get more wifi coverage or something.
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.
As much as vibe coding is obviously ridiculous, using it as a crutch purposefully in this way is amazing. I heard someone call it a tool for energy management once and I feel that
Thanks! Yeah another side project I used was once I got home assistant running I used ChatGPT to write a lot of ESP32 code for me to get some soil moisture sensors working for my outdoor garden. It also gave me a lot of input on the wiring up of the sensor and ESP32. And it helped me with the general concepts of ESP-IDF versus Arduino frameworks for ESP32, getting an SSD1306 OLED screen running on it and and and...
So yeah, it enables my brain to just chase the inspiration rabbit without getting too bogged down in infrastructure.
Shout out to all those generous souls who posted how-to's and project notes for their IoT projects, so that machines could learn from them.
RIP to those generous souls
Why would it be obviously ridiculous if it granted the parent commenter so much productivity?
Perhaps the same obvious ridiculousness that manual agrarians passed upon the tractor.
Vibe coding is not using a chat interface to explore an unfamiliar domain like GP describes, it's letting an agent tool like Cursor or Goose do most of the work semi-independently.
Vibe coding is not looking at the code, essentially. See what Simon Willison has written about it (the original term was coined[0] by Andrej Karpathy): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
[0] Only two months ago!
I feel this in a side project way but also in a hobby project way.
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.
This sounds amazingly cool, would love to read about the process after you’re done if you have an intention to write about it.
A side project is creative while work is reductive (not necessarily a bad thing!)
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.
Great metaphor but I feel like my day job is graffiti style crap code that just barely passes QA while all of my side project code is the good good 3 coats of SW superpaint
Graffiti can be as beautiful or messy as you want! You can put any amount of effort in to the craft
I love the freedom in a side project to write a thing, then rewrite it, then decide on a new requirement and rewrite it again. No deadlines, no stress, just incrementally experimenting until I'm happy.
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)
I think it's nice to be able to write something well, polished and sturdy. Something better than at work. higher ideals.
Or, to write something that is house of cards nonsense that would never fly at work but does something fun. You don't have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is the BEST.
Oh absolutely, the real win is being able to play with a concept with no risk
I feel this will resonate with a lot of us. For a lot of years I very much lost the love of the web I'd had since the mid 90s.
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.
I'm in my 50s and I'm currently mulling the conundrum of being an artist and designer with art and design side projects, and now having them sidelined by a new-found interest in p5js. I'm getting little glimpses of observing myself and how I'm responding to my side-project time being increasingly compacted by parenting, work and also a recent flush of training for a mountain run (in order to maintain some fitness) - I also had a temporary obsession with learning wheelies on my bike, which further compacted time available for javascript learning outside of work hours.
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 think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.
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.
I love this.
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.
I agree with that last bit - sometimes you gotta drop the time associated with polish of a finished product and play around.
Always stuck with me that pretty much every famous piece of art has a long backlog of practice to get to that point.
This article really resonated with me.
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.
I really like the concept of night driving in the city.
My side projects have always mirrored work to a certain extent, kind of building what I wish I could really do at work.
Led to my current job, which I love. Hopefully this lasts.
Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.
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.
I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.
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.
There's nothing more euphoric to me than working on a good project which I thought of as an idea and watching it turn real. I can work on it all day and not feel tired.. in the zone, meditating.. building.
The interesting thing with my side projects is that they are ever so close to being a full-on business, but they are slightly under the threshold where I could go all in (stay at home wife, three kids, American healthcare costs). So, it’s hard to think of them as “side” projects when in reality they’ve become a “side” business. It’s like I have no choice but to take them a bit seriously, though I do hope to find the time for a “love of the game” side project. Great post.
I’m a bit behind where you are with my side businesses, and the way I feel about them is more acutely aware of the time tradeoff I have to make to work on them.
To side hustle on my job board, I have to give up hanging out with my kid.
That’s just not a trade I’ve felt like making recently.
On top of that, I just changed jobs, and got a very appreciable salary bump for it. It makes the grind of the side business seem pretty paltry in comparison: the returns on my main career track are just so much bigger thanks to my compounding experience and skill there.
> I’ve spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with that approach.
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.
This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.
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 there are two kinds of side projects. One type is a small project that can be coded up in a short time (a weekend or a few evenings). It reaches a functional stage rather quickly and only takes a few hours to fix bugs or improve the user experience.
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 love this, and yes can completely relate. The last side project I got absorbed into[0] completely consumed me for a weekend. I was driven like a man possessed to finish it before Monday. I had to leave the house and stake out a corner in a coffee shop to concentrate. The scope of the project was perfect: it was small enough to do in a weekend, I was building something I needed, and something that could help others. Creating something is so much fun, especially when you have a long-lasting way to share it like your own website.
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...
I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have in my career came because my side projects were interesting and sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's so much specialization in our era – being able to connect dots across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a superpower.
this resonates.
"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.
I like to have side projects that end in a blog post. So many people never share side projects because they are going for perfection and give up on the way, but if the end result is not code or a product I find it more enjoyable to work on. Like have a vision of what you want to explore and focus on that.
Most of my creation is done at work now, previously more balanced outside of work with side projects but with little kids a more demanding job its hard, so outside work time is more consumption, though some of that is social consumption which I feel has value (pub, gaming).
I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]
[1] summary by Gemini
Thanks for citing your AI source, it's really much appreciated. But having read that book, it can't be properly summarized by AI.
I had no idea what I was getting into with that book
Really enjoying this thread, especially the points about creative cycles and the connection between stress and our drive to create. I recently wrote a book that dives into some of this, blending behavioral psychology with mindset principles like the law of attraction. It’s all about how our habits, thoughts, and environment shape our ability to stay inspired and follow through on projects.
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've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well. A lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.
I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then
I’ve finally gotten to a place in my life financially where I don’t care as much about the potential of making money from side projects and get to just build what I find interesting with the care and attention that I’ve always wanted.
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)
It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good".
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.
Is it weird that I actually think that sounds enjoyable?
Said it before and will say it again : side project are the antidote to burnout.
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 !
I had a lot of fun overengineering the hell out of the status bar in Sway recently. It was something that I got working in fifteen minutes in Bash, and then ended up rewriting in Clojure, then figuring out how to get working with GraalVM, and then just kept adding features and making it more customizable.
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.
-Written by human, not AI
Love that you added this to the footer on your website. Goodbye ‘organic’ and ‘non-GMO’ and hello ‘AI-Free’ XD
A million years ago (in the age of “made in Dreamweaver” badges on web sites) I had a dumb little ball-and-stick image of adenosine triphosphate and I made a dumb little “made with ATP” badge, because I typed out html with plain-vanilla vim.
That badge is from Not By AI: https://notbyai.fyi/about
I’ve had a similar feeling lately after deciding to dust off some old textbooks and brush up on my math.
I’ve noticed I get this same feeling by writing a tight prompt to AI. Not even reading the result fully, just sending it to be deep processed.
Good for a quick hit of bliss zen when you need it.
Ah yes, "blissful" Zen. That's the best kind!
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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/
What's the meaning of this? Be spontaneous and give up on contriving so much
I don't get how for most people, work is nothing more than a meaningless task. Why is that?
I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.
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??)
It'd be nice if folks stopped using a religion as a catch phrase. If I included Jesus in a catchy title people would be offended
Gatekeeping the use of the word Zen in English is probably counter to the core principles ironically. But I understand your concern.
Even the CPU in my computer is named Zen
Creation-to-Consumption ratio, really well put. I never thought of this before, but will now keep this in my mental models
> I’ve spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with that approach.
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.
It reminded me a part of the "The Tar Pit" esssay from The Mythical Man-month:
> 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.
Wrt creating, writing a blog post also counts!
This post hit the nail on the head for me.
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
Echoes of Howard Roark.
"The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements."
Documentation quality has been the determining factor in the evolution of my side projects. I've developed a structured documentation system that has completely transformed my workflow with AI assistants.
Can you share more about this?
I think that's often the thing that kills my side projects. I'll make reasonable progress, lose interest for a bit, and then when I come back to it all the working memory is gone and so I spend a few hours just getting up to speed again. Better ongoing documentation to allow quicker self-onboarding is what I need!
I've had reasonable success with taking diary-style notes on whatever project I'm working on within that project's page in Obsidian, and then when I need to come back to it, either reading over it or passing it through a LLM to summarise / ask me targeted questions to prod my memory.
How do people with kids do this kind of stuff lol?
Late nights and not enough sleep
They're 10X parents.
they don't