Posted by ingve 4/4/2025
Even the CPU in my computer is named Zen
I burned out on gaming a few years ago. I used to be able to power through weeks of the most inane incremental "game" slop as if it was a voyage to the new world. Now I struggle to force myself to play the most acclaimed AAA titles for 15-20 minutes. I still browse the steam store from time to time, but I finally stopped buying things.
The amount of time I spend on side projects has almost perfectly filled the gap. There have even been a few nights recently where I stayed up very late to watch an experiment unfold. We're talking about staring at a single chart that updates once a second for hours that is getting my heart rate up like a League of Legends game.
I think from a dopamine perspective, you can make a good trade here. The other side can feel even better. It's the transition period that hurts. You've got to get that first tiny bit of traction on the project so it feels like you might eventually have an impact in the world around you. The more it sucks during the first 48 hours, the more likely it will stick indefinitely. When you come back in the morning to a successful experiment run or a good stopping point, it can very quickly snowball into something that rivals the pharmacology of gaming.
> Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? > First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design.
...
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.
Having just finished up a 4-year contracting gig this week, I decided to learn Svelte and recreate a silly little music PoC I made about 15 years ago:
Demo: http://lets-make-sweet-music.com Github: http://github.com/paulbjensen/lets-make-sweet-music
I started making it about 2 days ago - One of my former colleagues even managed to play the Jurassic Park theme song on it for a bit.
What I loved about working on that side project I think is a couple of things:
1 - I could have an idea, implement it, and push it up right away.
This is a breathe of fresh air compared to the coding process at my last gig. The client had a well-structured process of submitting pull requests which required a code review approval before being merged into the codebase.
That process meant that you essentially spent your day picking up tickets and moving them along, and because people wouldn't necessarily be immediately available to perform the code review, the PR could stay open for quite some time.
That delayed feedback loop and hoop-jumping process adds stop-starts into the coding flow state. You can never get into it the same way you can working on a side project.
2 - The tech stack choices are yours to make and quick to do
The tech stack choices used with the client were made by the tech steering committee and your job was essentially to implement the features required by your product team within the parameters of those tech stack choices. They do that to ensure that there is a consistent use of technologies within the company, to the extent that you can quickly swap say frontend engineers from one team to another whenever needed and they can be productive.
On one hand that is great, but on the other hand you don't have the freedom to try new technologies, or even introduce tooling that you feel is better suited for the requirement.
I even had to justify trying to use Sentry rather than ElasticSearch's Kibana for error logging, even though the client was using both tools within the business.
When you are working on the side project, you can make choices and decisions far quicker and easier - the feedback loop is just much quicker and progress happens faster.
3 - The scope of your input into the side project is far greater
When I worked with the client, I was effectively working as a frontend engineer, because they had a gap in a product team to fill.
However, my skills and experience in my career extended to being a full-stack developer who also liked to work on design work in Sketch and even knew how to deploy to VPS, not just work with a PaaS.
When you don't get to use those skills daily in your client work, they will wither, and you can end up becoming pigeon-holed and institutionalised into a narrow way-of-working, which is a danger to being able to apply the full extent of your capabilities.
So the side projects end up serving as a way to exercise those underused skills. Especially if you relish having creative freedom, which reminds me of something that Paul Graham said about developers - they don't do it necessarily for the money - they do it to have creative freedom.
I haven't found the link to the video, but he touches on it a bit in this post: https://www.paulgraham.com/really.html