> That’s taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and applying it to a space where I had total freedom.

Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time.

Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring corporate crap.

I don't known how all of you "homelab" people put up with it. I have enough Linux boxes at work that demand too much care and feeding.

The author has a good point but it really isn't a two-way street. The hobby stuff can feed into your career, but letting it go the other way is usually either counterproductive, or bad for your mental health.

Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.

Tinker in your shed because it makes you happy, and brings joy and meaning to your life. You'll be more productive and, in my experience, you'll actually be more likely to learn something useful for work.

This post really resonated with me. Through the daily drudgery, I lost that spark that drove me to programming in the first place as a kid and became disgruntled with it for a while. It wasn't until I pushed myself to get back to hobby (or shed) programming that I rekindled my old passion and, as a result, find my day job much more bearable.

I finally have a garage where i can weld my own bike frame!

No more coding after 5pm!

Is there a place where people can document and share the things they are tinkering with in the shed?

I had this idea where people's inventions/devices could be sent around in a "pay-it-forward circle" for learning and inspiration. People already do that with crystals.

Also, can being aware that x number of people are working on the same thing yield to development in the state-of-the-art if they start working together?

I suppose there's always that tension between DIY'ers bouncing ideas off each other vs prototypes built in fitted-out research labs to think about.

Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-reddit or using existing teamwork software?

If you had something to share, how would you choose it amongst the 10's or 100's of things you have already built? Maybe you'd need commercialization help? Are there liabilities and risks in sharing DIY devices?

I've been thinking about https://openhardware.directory/ and https://ohwr.org/ - maybe if you list your projects, agents can do the work of bringing people together and finding new ways to develop them. It's about value-adding on top of decentralized and disjointed projects. An easy way to construct plans or follow them? How to minimize duplicated work across the world?

Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (http://ucp.dev) but for scientists?

I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot of fun and the side projects gave me energy.

Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.

I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've actually done.

Everytime I go back and look at some of my older projects, I am in awe of how much I had done in the short while when I was working on it. Side Projects are kind of the only real way I think one can learn software engineering. Great read

https://speakoala.com/

Personally, I am over side projects.

Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.

I just do other things now.

Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).

It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.

Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it’s tedious, I’ll drag me feet a while, but eventually it’ll be done. It’s just work.

The big problem starts when your job contract limits what you can do with your intellectual property. Then you can have. your shed, but you can't show it to anyone, you can't invite friends, you can't use to plan your future business etc.

It is about finding balance between building in your shed and building skyscrapers.

The second half of this article is detected as AI by pangram: https://www.pangram.com/history/63fdecd4-f932-4fad-af60-da99...