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.

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dgb23 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s this special feeling when you can sit down later in the evening to tinker for a couple of hours, or read a challenging/inspiring book in peace.

But when I don’t have time and frankly energy, then I still try to do _some_ minutes of this kind of thing daily.

I feel like there‘s a big difference between 0min and 15min for anything (also includes exercise, meditation etc.), and while it’s great to have more time, there are diminishing returns beyond 30/45min.

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franciscop 3 hours ago | parent [-]

When I push myself to do these things, it loses all meaning. I do fun programming because it's fun, when I tried pushing myself like this virtually always I ended up more tired (for a miryad of reasons). And if I need to push myself, I'd rather just learn more Japanese, or do some exercise, or something else. But when I have like 1-2 weeks holiday, I will for sure sneak a few full coding days in there, and that is liberating.

	▲	dgb23 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with this. But there‘s a big difference between building a habit of doing some intellectual or creative activity regularly and pushing yourself to do a specific thing. Before having built a more regular habit I was often in a sort of excitement-burnout loop. That doesn’t work well for me.