Protect your shed
Discusses personal productivity and professional development through hobby coding. Long-term positive impact on labor quality, but no immediate financial/crypto market moving sentiment.
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- netule: 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY: I’m retired (not really by choice), and spend <i>huge</i> amounts of time, coding. I’ve written over 20 shipped apps (many have been deprecated and retired, though); mostly since retiring.<p>I’ve had to drastically reduce the scope of my work, but not the Quality. Working alone, means smaller goals.<p>LLMs are a game-changer, here. They are helping me to re-expand my scope. I’m not where I was, while getting paid, but I’m getting a lot done.
- aledevv: > <i>The shed is where you take the blueprints you learned on the job and actually get to play with them.</i><p>> <i>You try something in the shed on a weekend because you’re curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the documentation doesn’t tell you. Then months later, when the team at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you’re not starting from zero.</i><p>These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.<p>Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do something useful.<p>My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of my own.
- KaiserPro: I have a shed, and I agree with the broad thrust of the argument.<p>During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that had the emotional stick of a bad workplace.<p>However. I have mostly overcome that now. If you want to see how I built it: <a href="https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/</a><p>my most recent "finished" project is this: <a href="https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/despatchbox-pro/" rel="nofollow">https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/despatchbox-pro/</a> which doesn't contain any electronics. This is unusual for me.<p>The projects I am most proud of are:<p><a href="https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-clock/" rel="nofollow">https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...</a> Which is a clock using a tuning fork<p>and <a href="https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-machine/" rel="nofollow">https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-machin...</a> which is a facsimile of a stock ticker
- ryukoposting: > That’s taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and applying it to a space where I had total freedom.<p>Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.<p>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.
- franciscop: I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot of fun and the side projects gave me energy.<p>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.<p>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.
- nchmy: I don't have a skyscraper job, or even a low-rise, but I appreciate this article nonetheless as someone who has been self-learning how to turn a rickety shed project into perhaps a sturdy low-mid rise.<p>I've gone down endless lengthy detours that often lead to dead ends, but I've learned an immense amount from the OS to CSS. It's finally coming together in a simpler way than I had previously envisioned. Hopefully this year it'll be ready.
- apt-apt-apt-apt: OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home.<p>For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.
- jrm4: I love this point, but also it seems to me that "not understanding the difference between a skyscraper and a shed" is perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking and talking about software development in general.<p>Like, "is vibecoding good or bad?"<p>Depends! Probably fine for a shed and terrible for a skyscraper. Or maybe there are some things within the skyscraper that might be vibecodable? I don't know.
- adrianwaj: Is there a place where people can document and share the things they are tinkering with in the shed?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-reddit or using existing teamwork software?<p>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?<p>I've been thinking about <a href="https://openhardware.directory/" rel="nofollow">https://openhardware.directory/</a> and <a href="https://ohwr.org/" rel="nofollow">https://ohwr.org/</a> - 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?<p>Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (<a href="http://ucp.dev" rel="nofollow">http://ucp.dev</a>) but for scientists?
- droidjj: > No blueprints, no permits, no audits.<p>Where I live, permits are required for all sheds, and for those above a certain size you have to submit blueprints.
- zoobab: I finally have a garage where i can weld my own bike frame!<p>No more coding after 5pm!
- vachanmn123: 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
- possiblydrunk: Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too, brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh. Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to development of my shed.
- d--b: Personally, I am over side projects.<p>Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.<p>I just do other things now.<p>Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).<p>It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.<p>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.