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This resonates strongly with me. Let me offer a possible coping mechanism: realize that you are an artist. You are a true hacker. For people like us, having i

• AstralStorm 9y ago
  None of the apps or services are even close to art. (Including state of the art.) This is the main problem of small projects that aren't cutting edge. To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers. (Even many startups fail this litmus test.) Hacking is fun, but life as a starving programmer is not. There is a vast difference between getting reasonable money and negative money. Bigger than between making reasonable living wage and being filthy rich in fact.
  • madamelic 9y ago
    >To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers. Building Uber and creating Uber are two entirely different things. It is easy to build something if you have the blueprint, it is much harder to imagine something new and build it without knowing the exact next step.
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      Oh but Uber itself is a pretty big and ambitious idea past the single sentence description. It also touches a basic need of transportation and is very ambitious.(trying to displace taxis everywhere) Due to the scale of the idea, both creating and building Uber is a hard task. (Mostly because at small scale you have stiff competition - so it does not make sense asy small scale.) For comparison, you could back of envelope analyse the market impact of, say, automated 2D floor and garden planning with AI. It is possible to undercut in a week in implementation and in seconds by a single guy with marketing and connections. On the upside, it could be pivoted. The main drawback is that it also does not make sense at a local level. (Unlike the 3D printer repair which might.)
  • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    They're all art, more or less. Most art isn't 'state of the art' and it's not obvious why that matters, unless you personally care about that. This person didn't seem to. The existence of (lots of) 'starving artists' is pretty strong evidence that at least some people may ultimately benefit from art that doesn't turn a profit. Some people definitely need to make art, whatever the cost to them personally. I'm one of them. (And I'm lucky that my art is really cheap to make.)
  • godot 9y ago
    The author mentions being a full time software engineer and working on these projects after work. I think he isn't a starving programmer; and I'm going to guess he's probably even getting more than "reasonable money" (but not filthy rich). It's really more of a question of finding meanings; I see where he's coming from. There is a certain kind of despair when you look back at 10 years worth of side projects and none have "taken off". I've only seriously worked on side projects in the past 3~4 years (full time engineer for 10 years), and even with less than half the time spent, and less than half projects completed compared to OP, I still feel a bit of this.
  • spacebear 9y ago
    How do you define art? I've always liked Scott McCloud's definition from Understanding Comics: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction." In my view, anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist.
    • gt_ 9y ago
      I am not super familiar with Scott McCloud so sorry for that, but I'm very admirable of comics from a distance. I think it's worth mentioning I think this might be a little outdated of a definition because philosophy and art is agreeing more every day that everything in art grows out of the survival and reproduction instincts. They also appear to agree more every day that your last point, that "anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist" holds true.
    • drcube 9y ago
      Consider the question of why humans evolved to make art in the first place, and you'll probably conclude that it was sexual selection. In other words, artists get laid. Though it may be that artists get respect in general, which improves chances of survival in a social species like ours. So I respectfully disagree with Mr. McCloud's definition.
      • runeb 9y ago
        What then about anonymous artists such as Banksy? Many of the artists we today view as great, such as Van Gogh, were in their time neither respected nor enjoyed financial or, as you offer, sexual benefits from their art. They still pursued it, often into abject poverty and early deaths.
      • goatlover 9y ago
        Why reduce all activity to such simplistic motivations? Maybe art is a spandrel. Maybe artists don't get laid any more often than non-artists. Maybe human beings do lots of things that have little to do with passing their genetic material on, because we've acquired motivations that aren't simply reducible to survival or sex. Maybe some of us realized that making art was enjoyable, regardless of whatever reason it arose in the species a couple million years ago.
  • jancsika 9y ago
    > To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers. Just as an aside, serious free software maintenance work is not cutting edge and also fulfills your challenge of not being "outsource-able" to a small team of low-wage devs. Or at least I've always assumed it is. Where can I pay some small amount of money to test and see whether a small team can "fix X without breaking the users' existing programs" for a poorly documented FLOSS interface that depends on undefined behavior in C?
    • jancsika 9y ago
      Scratch that-- I just realized that most of the problems I encounter in FLOSS maintenance consist of explaining/documenting the problem. Once I can refine the question of, "Why is the loader being a butt," to, "Why is the loader recursing 1000 levels deep before bailing?" I'm already 90% of the way to solving the problem.
      • AstralStorm 9y ago
        If it takes a single person about a week to do it and mostly by solving a puzzle, then it is not art again, but craft. Even writing an OSS project from scratch. It only becomes art if it really is done either clearly superior or is something entirely new. Plus it must be executed really well.
  • WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
    A cutting edge product does not mean a successful product. There's plenty of tech already. All I need is for someone to help me make my life better with a killer product or service that uses it or at least show me how to use tech better towards my advantage. Perfect example, binder clips, low tech but I'm always finding new uses for it and people show me new uses. Another example the tech for cell phones was around for years before the cell phone. It took someone to put it together to create something useful.
  • alistproducer2 9y ago
    They very much are art. Even if you're writing the nth incarnation of some tired JS pattern framework, you're coding it the way you want. Your making an API that makes sense to you. In short, the way you chose to implement the tired Ideas is unique to you. It's self expression that others can see. How is that different than a painter reinterpreting some famous piece of work?
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      Not all creation is art. You don't see people declaring newspapers art, or utilitarian chairs art either. It has to be something new and different. Otherwise at best you have kitsch. There is a vast difference between art and craft.
      • alistproducer2 9y ago
        So I guess Warhol isn't art? You are making some very opinionated claims that don't have any basis in, well anything. Take a read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art
• WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
  Products for the sake of art will not make you a business success. You have to ship and you have to sell. Tinkering and producing products for yourself is very satisfying but don't expect to have a killer business out of it. If that's what you want to do then get a job in a research lab or a product development company. It will be a dream come true. A perfect example of someone that loved to tinker and research but could not produces a successful product was Tesla. He invented mind blowing technology but was never able to create a successful company out of it. As a matter of fact the Google funders learnt from him and decided to put business and profit above technology so they could have the money to produce and finance the tech they love.
• sghall 9y ago
  Even if none of these were a commercial success, it's quite a resume and shows an ability to bring an idea to life. I think what the author needs to do is look for a business savvy partner that can focus on making a viable product. They're different skill sets. The Jobs/Wozniak kind of synergy.
• dheera 9y ago
  I build a lot of things in my own time as well and I learn a lot from them. But for me they're not "worthless". They are just my way of mental relaxation and being my true self, which I cannot do in the commercial world. I love building stuff that has no purpose whatsoever but is just cool. I love building stuff that only I have a use for. I love doing tech for artistic value because I believe in art as well. Some people watch Netflix and go to bars. That's their way of fun and that's fine. My ways of having fun just happen to be (0) travelling and (1) building stuff.
  • milkytron 9y ago
    I too like building things that I have a use for. And I do think sometimes maybe I'm not the only one who could make use out of it, which is why I believe so much in open source, whether the tool is menial or not.
• rdiddly 9y ago
  Obviously there are parallels in other creative fields. The money thing was a big part of what almost ruined music for me - not only wanting to make money from it, but actually succeeding at making some money from it (which was somehow paradoxically even worse than wanting to). Looking at it as an art, that you do for enjoyment or fun or the heck of it or some other reason or no reason at all, is important.
• alistproducer2 9y ago
  >realize that you are an artist That statement resonates with me - immensely. I was a musician for almost a decade before going to school for CS. I feel in love with the creativity that knowing how to code enabled. Just like the author, I made my fair share of worthless side projects and just like him I felt pressure to monetize them to no success which ultimately took all the fun out of them. I've never been able to get the fire back to make stuff just because I can. I really hate that I've lost that.
• marssaxman 9y ago
  One can also think of work on one's "side projects" as something like a musician's practice sessions. There's value in the time spent even if all you're doing is drilling your fingers and keeping your technique sharp. It can also be an opportunity to stretch yourself and develop new skills beyond what your main gig calls for.