Recreational Programming(cphiri.dev) |
Recreational Programming(cphiri.dev) |
Teaching myself assembler was harder because I had no docs. I was so clueless I actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called to ask where I could get a manual. The sales rep who answered the phone must have taken pity on me because he mailed the CPU manual for free. I still have the purple reference card and remember the common opcodes by heart (https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...)
The first time I made money was about 18 months later when I wrote a pretty handy disk utility program. Stayed up all Friday night finishing it. Copied onto floppies I sold for $5 at the local user's group Saturday morning. Made $140 and got my first 28 customers. That was enough to get me hooked on making software and selling it. ~40 years, three startups, over a dozen products, hundreds of good people employed, a couple million customers and two PC Magazine Product of the Year awards later - I regret nothing. Started on a lark to learn and have fun. Much was learned, fun was had. Wonderful journey - highly recommend.
Is there an equivalent to that today? As soon as a cool technology appears, there are startups selling something within a few weeks. What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Well, hitting the first home run took about a decade full of base hits and more than a few strike-outs on the way to figuring out what I needed to know to do a tech startup well.
> What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Over the last decade I've spent increasing pro bono time trying to 'pay it forward' talking to classes and groups of erstwhile entrepreneurs, so I've heard versions of that question a LOT. It actually took me a couple years before I realized there is no 'right' answer because the right thing for each person differs depending their unique personality, skills, interests, context and life journey.
The most helpful thing I can share isn't a guess about which target you should aim for but rather some advice about how to approach your journey. First, I hope you want to be a tech entrepreneur because that's the only thing I know about. I have no idea what skills will be in demand to get a high-paying, secure job or how to get promoted. I had to become an entrepreneur because I was terrible at being an employee.
I never aimed for my guess at what would be "hot" next and I doubt my guess would be right anyway. Every time I found success it was by starting with a real problem some customer actually had. Initially that customer was me or a friend but it doesn't matter. It just has to be a serious enough problem that motivated customers are actively looking for new and better solutions than what exists. Then figure out a way to solve their problem better enough that they'll actually buy it. It doesn't have to be perfect in every way, just better enough in most ways and perfect in at least one way.
In fact, some of my best products became hits by cleverly solving one part of a problem SUPER well, at the cost of some serious downsides in other areas. For example, my friends and I all desperately wanted a Zig-Zag Widget but good ones were stupid expensive and the ones ordinary schmoes like us could afford Zigged and Zagged like shit. But we figured out I how to make a Zig-Only Widget we could actually afford. No Zag but it Zigged better than the best and that was a trade-off I was okay with. Turns out other people were too... especially after we worked on adding some 'pseudo-Zag' features that worked around the worst parts of not Zagging. The world's best Zig (but no Zag) at 1/4th the price of even a half-assed Zig-Zag. Not really new technology, just a very clever mixture of the exact right old tech with a little new stuff, some clever UX innovations and cool workflow integrations. First Product of the Year.
If prototyping dozens of different iterations and trying each one out with real, live problem-having customers and listening empathetically to their constant complaints, ridiculous demands and occasional awesome suggestions sounds like fun, then you may have found your calling. If you just want to write great code for a good paycheck and be left in peace, then, my friend, don't just walk... run the other way. :-)
It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!
So if an external factor like LLM prowess “killed it all” for you, I would suggest you may not have been intrinsically motivated in the first place.
Long live recreational programming. It’s fun and, personally, it’s satisfying building things close to the metal.
You can still build a table from scratch even though you can buy one from Ikea.
etc etc
Have been used some spare time to learn common lisp and write a manual project, still use web based AI as a quick search method.
But I managed to learn some common lisp and how to do cffi in common lisp and
- use gtk4 cffi binding to start a GUI app - write a ghostty cffi to encode/decode terminal escape sequences - write a libssh2 cffi to communicate with a ssh server
Hope I can build a minimal SSH Terminal using common lisp to keep on experiment and exploration
I have a bunch of abandoned repos. I used to want to finish some of them, so perhaps I can show them to some people and get a in-domain job, but recently I realized that it is probably impossible for me to do so. I don’t have success because I don’t chase it. I chase fun and that’s what I should expect, not other things like career switch or monetary rewards.
I was looking for this one. It's far beyond a mere "style". It breaks the entire premise.
Being a "problem solver" means you live with the code you write on a daily basis the same way as anyone with any other skill such as woodworking or sewing/knitting.
For the people who think writing code (without AI) is so hard that they make it a separate "thing" away from their usual life, I have to also wonder whether they can cook their own breakfast.