Posted by bundie 6 days ago
-Family calendar/weather dashboard
-Bluesky reader that allows you to hide posts you've "seen"
-Work PM dashboard to make time tracking more gamified and dare I say... fun?
-Chrome Reddit extension that hides posts after viewing for X seconds
-A WordPress plugin to replace a plugin no longer maintained
What I love and had to get used to was looking/using these apps and being happy with them being only 90%. Initially I had Claude make many UI enhancements but I learned to just let most stuff go and focus on the function and building new stuff, not refinement.
The whole thing with getting people to like your work, using it for clout or padding your resume has an appeal to it that I won't dismiss, but all that takes the fun out of it.
I just don't have much else I actually enjoy in life, so ruining it with peer-pressure, chasing clout, impressing people, worrying about career prospects is a buzz-kill. I used to think that if I am passionate about something like this and I get really good at it, maybe it will help my career and prospects but the real world doesn't work that way. it sucks the joy, fun and passion out of you if you let it.
All that to say it is perfectly fine to like coding for the sake of enjoying it and nothing more. Others play a sport (or watch it), work on arts & crafts, or raise chickens or whatever, I code. I am not particularly skilled or great at coding either, I just enjoy it, and that's it.
If you have fun coding, be protective of your joy! even if you don't take it to the extreme like I do. that's my only point.
It takes regex(s), searches attribute values and/or inner text, and applies a given CSS rule to elements that match. The UI is awful (regex escaped to be inside a json string escaped to be inside a textarea all parsed by javascript) but I know how to use it.
It can probably be used for many things, but I just use it to set visibility: none on elements that link to sites I don't ever want to see (facebook, twitter, linkedin, popular pay/register-walled sites, etc). For example, my HN and reddit views just have blank lines where links any of those sites would normally be. For the most part, I add a site once, and forget they ever existed (except when their CEOs do awful things).
For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and AWS EC2. And then as the "customer app", I run CockroachDB, rqlite, and tiDB on it (one at a time, I don't want to burn money for this).
It was janky, zero SLA, I likely mis-tuned all the databases, and cost a bit of money :(. But it totally worked, all the db nodes can discover each other. I was satisfied and that's enough.
Another example would be writing my own Raft-backed database, similar to the ToyDB Rust project posted here. Is the DB useful? No. But it is so much fun and I learned a lot.
My AWS S3 bucket and private Git repo are a graveyard full of toy projects. My own Dropbox clone, Pinterest clone, Delicious clone, subset of Google Maps clone, etc. etc. are all RIP in there.
If you're interested in writing Raft-backed databases you might be interested in my talk at GopherCon 2023. It walks through doing exactly that, step by step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbxQ1Epi5w
Can I ask what you had running on that cluster?
Not exactly fun :)
What's interesting is that the TailScale network allows the local daemon be exposed on the internet with small settings change. Pretty revolutionary for personal/home IoT projects.
Sad but true. I especially feel that comment about losing the most “joyful” part.
I don’t like this either but every time I use LLMs it feels like we’re talking about completely different things. It moves waaay to fast and makes bad decisions at every turn, if I accepted them all it would be complexity deadlock within a week tops. Pooping out boilerplate sure but then you’re generally holding it wrong anyway (or there’s an opportunity to automate things). Plus even if you don’t have the time to automate it, sure, but then are you enjoying the act of shitting out your own boilerplate?
Out of the things I consider fun the LLM is at best a good rubber duck. It needs constant hand-holding, sometimes polluting the context window (and physical space) with a barrage of poorly written code. Code is bad, we’re trying to minimize it. No? At least that’s how I think: what’s the minimum* amount of code that can solve this problem?
*: minimum in a brain complexity sense, not char count. They correlate strongly though
I understand the draw and usefulness of this, but just clarifying, it's not the typing that matters, it's what is going on (or not going on) in one's mind.
# Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"
I don't need to let a computer write my software. I already know how, and I enjoy it. I need the computer to do the hard part (gathering requirements, speaking with stakeholders, etc).
Software is a joy.
I had a shift of perspective at some point where I realized that software wasn't just fun to create, but you can solve problems with it, including your own, which is incredibly rewarding and kinda feels like wizardry.
Ultimately I find both to be enjoyable, though in terms of career and life outcomes, focusing on solving real problems and producing tangible outcomes has had more of an impact than noodling with neat implementations that nobody but me cared about.
Turns out if you solve your own problems (or just publicly work toward solving them), there are often other people who also struggle with the sam problems, who may throw money your way ;-)