Just for Fun. No

I’ve always been in the camp that I enjoy making things and code is simply the medium in which I feel most comfortable to do so. Sometimes with money in mind, sometimes not.

In a similar vein, I really enjoy building alongside others. So, I’ve been running a group that all build things together over the course of 6-week cohorts.[0] (Just finished the second one!) it’s really fun to see everyone nerd-out about their project and challenges they face. And hits that pure “just for fun. No really” vibe for me.

[0] https://lmt2.com

I've often described my motivation for building software to others using imagery: I like to go find a secluded beach, build a large, magnificent sand castle, and then walk away. Will anyone notice? Probably not. Will the waves eventually destroy it? Yep. Did I still get immense satisfaction? Absolutely.

I had a bad interview experience where the interviewer asked me to walk him through a project, so I chose something I worked on at home for a few months.

He kept questioning me "why" I made the project after I repeatedly told him it was just for fun and learning. He just could not imagine why I would spend a decent amount of time outside of work where I worked on something just for fun.

LLMs have really provided me with a lot of confidence to explore making more fun random projects. I personally didn't like the long research process and tool setup just to begin to do something basic. Now a lot of friction is gone and I can prompt a silly idea and get a super simple prototype running and then from there, tinker on my own.

I made this geolocation music web app that plays a little tune based on your precise location. It's just a little fun toy that serves no purpose but I regularly use it when I go for walks just to hear the variation in tunes in different parts of my city.

https://geo-tune.vercel.app/

In my personal career path, I went from being too tired to work on personal projects, to only working on stuff which might have monetary value, to lately deciding I'd rather live somewhere cheaper so I can afford time between contracts to work on whatever I want, especially the moonshot projects. You know, those kind of projects you have dreamt about for years, that might take 10 years to achieve.

The goal is to work in weekly sprints. Like one or two weeks a month might be contract work, and 2 or 3 weeks a month dedicated to those projects that keep me up at night.

Basically yes, do it for fun, but also set serious time aside for it. It is so sad having dreams that have no time to be explored.

This aligns well with a discussion I had with some colleagues yesterday, and how good artists, authors, programmers, painters, etc. focused on pumping volume. My example was John Carmack's days in Softdisk who was forced to make games that they were nothing to write home about, but according to himself "the time constrains and need to build monthly played a great role in developing our skills that would be later used to make something like Doom".

That's when I realized the root of my own procrastination: I was trying to choose "the right language", to build "the right portfolio project", in order for me to get "the right job". And I thought to myself "no kid ever starts playing with a computer for something as shallow as getting a job".

It's not that there's something wrong with getting a job - I still need to pay the bills. But for the journey of self-improvement in any craft has to have yourself creating, as Carmack aptly puts, "hundreds of programs". Serial startup developers know this, because jumping from startup to startup will have you build stuff fast, fail fast, and learn from it.

After dealing with the products of people writing either "just for fun" or "just for profit", I think I'm ready to meet someone who's willing to try something a little in-between... because here we are, decades later, and Brooks' assertion about the cost of Programming Systems Products remains valid, and everything written either "just for fun" or "just for profit" seems to be little more than a Program, with all the attendant lack of sound engineering that comes with it. I'll happily pay for good programming systems products if someone is willing to actually write them. I just hope someone will get past this false fun/profit dichotomy so we can actually get there.

> If one spends a lot of time on Hacker News, or other startup-oriented news sites, they might believe that everyone is working on their next multi-million-dollar startup and/or exit strategy. It may be hard to imagine that people work on open source code purely for the fun of it.

There’s no contrast here. HN is my primary source of FOMO for programmers having more fun than me. No, really.

Bros just made a “be more like HN” manifesto.

Linus wrote a book how the Linux started Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

A little OT but instead of a regex a LLM can be really good to fix HN titles and avoid such errors, e.g.

    Prompt: remove any hyperbole from this title otherwise leave it as it is: "just for fun. no really"


    Gpt 4: The title “Just for Fun. No Really” doesn’t contain any hyperbole, so it can be left as it is.

High throughput Fizz Buzz and similar code golf challenges definitely hit the “just for fun” spirit.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr...

I really like the list included in this article and the general thesis of "try to have fun programming again!" However I think the post is just touching upon the deep hustle culture issue our culture has, which is in my opinion a symptom of late stage capitalism, where we are all transformed into nothing more than worker-consumers and the height of success is becoming a worksumer, where you've managed to monetize your consumption activities (streamers, influencers).

How can you justify coding "for fun" when realistically that time could be spent billing to a client? Even if it's just a couple hundred extra bucks a week, if you invest it wisely, come retirement that could be non-insignificant increase in your quality of life! Or maybe the extra cash saves your ass when you get an unexpected high medical bill, if you're an American.

Why would you build a FOSS project when Google or someone is just going to take your project and integrate it into something they're building, monetize their product, and you'll never see a cent of it? Or why work on your own FOSS project when you could do the more optimized thing of trying to get a commit in on react or vue or whatever which will blow the socks off your interviewers during your next job hunt?

Maybe we're all quite ill right now or maybe just I am if nobody else thinks like that. I don't have a solution it just makes me sad that that's how things seem to be right now, and that's just as a relatively well off American developer. I imagine it's even worse if you have to fight much harder to get the high paying jobs that I have much easier access to.

That resonates with me. My fun consists of throwing libraries away and doing things myself. I really like understanding the hidden fun stuff.

This is a great list of projects that are “for fun,” but the flaw is that all of them are “complete,” or at least achieve something close to their stated goal.

A true list of “for fun” would also include projects that were never finished, projects that someone spent a few weeks on and then forgot about, projects that were a dream and a mess of premature abstractions that never saw the light of day…

Coding for fun also means enjoying the journey and stopping when you feel like it.

I enjoy learning and teaching. In my spare time I build, or often half build things, and then write about aspects of the process. For the longest time I didn't even share my blog with people. I recently started sharing one particular series and I've gotten a number of comments on "why?" or "why not just use X library instead of building it from scratch?" Doing something just because seems lost on some people.

That's a great thing. It's like cooking and crafting an amazing meal just for one. It's a completely intrinsic experience but definitely worth it regardless.

I struggle to explain this mindset to some people that send me emails at pikuma.com. Still, my take is always: "if we need to explain why this course is exciting, then que question is probably already answered."

So I'm not the only one with a bad habit of typing funciton.

Exactly why I love being part of the Recurse Center community. It's a lovely little oasis full of gentlenerds who program seriously for the "joy of computing": https://joy.recurse.com/

I would add that like poems, a "logiciel" as we aptly say in French, is like echoes of some mind(s).

If you never wrote a poem, I encourage to do it so. I don't write them to publish them, and actually some of them I write them over several years or even decades. Not that they are that long, but where I have the privilege to do so, I like to let the initial vision mature. And when I read them from time to time, they do resonate with something deep inside me. I also write aphorisms in its dedicated note book.

I wish we had more programming language out there with only readable words in it to combine both the pleasure of out loud utterable and executable written pieces.

There's an excellent anecdote of Maxwell[0] and Thomson[1] looking at some experimental apparatus the former had built, and when the former says to just look through the eyepiece here, the latter asks him what the deuce the little man dancing in the corner is for.

— For? For fun, of course.

[0] I'm fairly sure; consider https://clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/html/zoetrope.html

[1] as he was then — not so sure that I recall this participant correctly

I have a "tinker" directory with decades worth of small, just-for-fun projects I've coded. Many of them are bleeding-edge browser experiments, and I don't want to bother with "requires such-and-such browser" messaging, I just want to see what is possible.

For most of them, building the thing is fun and instructive--and every once in a while I can draw from this reservoir of creativity for new public-facing projects. It's great!

When you only code for money, innovation is out of scope. Innovation demands focus, and focus comes with the fun you put into writing code.

Making contributions to open-source code of your choice just fun is something you can proudly tell others about because there is no money in it for you directly (Sponsors increase the excitement to work more, together and better).

Side projects can also become your source of fun if open-source projects are not for you, but you must share with people around you and the world.

The modern world is built on a happy coincidence that hackers found joy/fun in programming and also that sometimes that programming included useful things like file systems or OS's.

And, transferable tech. Things like large distributed video games, are difficult, and the tech built for 'fun game', can be transferred to industry.

When I was younger around the 2000s, there was a movement that was called "because I can" or something like that. This reminds me of that

I started learning HTML in middle school because it was fun. That was 20 years ago.

I'm still having fun. (but there's a little more javascript)

Some previous discussion:

2022:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255920

That Fred Brooks quote is amazing.

I’ve encountered a pattern where people that respect me see me as “more” than a software developer when I reach out into my network to do dev work

I’ve run companies, and done manager roles within organizations, I’m prideful of my coding abilities and find it more powerful of a skillset than management

Its objective to me to want to do individual contributor software dev work, and seeing how the corporate ladder has morphed into leveling to accommodate that, its really surprising and antiquated to hear their word choice of “more” than a developer

and its also sad to see how two-faced they are to their employees then, where they are seemingly gaslighting employees to being prideful of their wage work while being relieved to be exempt from that amongst people in the founder or capital tier that they respect

I like the build for fun and profit

The fun comes from frustration !

It it were really "just for fun", would you really feel the need to make a website spelling it out?

Title should be "Just for Fun. No Really."