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This is really nice and particularly resonant with me. I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never wen

This is really nice and particularly resonant with me. I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in kitchens and teaching guitar and such). I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs, gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that understanding by example. Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin it. But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.

and0 5y ago
I can say as someone who fell in love with coding that doing it professionally did not extinguish that fire. Still spent 12 or so hours doing game dev this weekend, and a few hours every night this week. e: To clarify I started learning in 2013ish, became a full-time dev in late 2015. So 6 years later, still finding joy in the day-to-day, but definitely have a special fire for the pipe-dream projects.
- EarthLaunch 5y ago
  That makes me curious what project you're working on, and you might be interested in my own pipe-dream project! There's a playfulness in doing something seemingly impossible, because succeeding at it simply means having fun playing with it.
  - and0 5y ago
    TL;DR multiplayer roguelike (or general tile-based) framework in Typescript https://github.com/and0p/chaos-core https://github.com/and0p/chaos-core
    - EarthLaunch 5y ago
      Oh very cool. You wrote your own ECS. I toyed with ECSY but realized it's not performant for games. Opinionated event messaging hmm. Mine's a low-res MMO client/server in JS. I loved Ultima Online and experimented with 'military' isometric projection, but landed back on 3D.
      - and0 5y ago
        Yeah! More accurately just EC, no real systems here. Roguelikes are highly deterministic and are not real-time, so a system updating all its respective components for every "tick" wouldn't really fit. The biggest obstacle with roguelike development is the way the components that make up an entity have to communicate in an agnostic way. Think if a wizard tries to freeze a warrior, where in the code/flow do you specify if that is or is not allowed? And what happens when you have extreme edge cases like if a specific area, a status applied to a teammate, or some random event nearby maybe says that the warrior is actually immune to being frozen? And what if the wizard's freeze spell is so powerful that it can ignore all of those obstacles? The approach I went with is that the EC side is relatively basic but all the components can optionally tap into a flux/redux-style event system, and those messages are very powerful in how they allow themselves to be modified or permitted/allowed while being deterministic. (And of course the message system allows for easy client/server logic, and super easy unit or integration testing of gameplay systems which hasn't felt like anything I've used before.) I'm quite liking it so far, hoping to have something more concrete in 5-6 months.
indigochill 5y ago
In my particular position as a professional self-taught dev (working as far from SV as possible), I would say it's a bit of a mix for me. I still obsess about code (more my own than work code), but I just don't have the mental bandwidth to code at work and then go full-bore into my own projects as well. I need to do other things with my time off. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking a less mentally draining career to focus my mental energies on my own things, but I also know I don't want to run a startup or think about money in relation to my own projects, so for now I feel like I'm happy with being on this side of the fence (it helps immensely that I happen to like my company and work).
Tade0 5y ago
> (I have an MA in philosophy), Judging by my experience you actually did go to school for it - or at least half of it. I worked with a few PhDs in this field and it appears that it uniquely prepares one for this line of work.
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  It's definitely something I would make known/have made known in my resumes/applications, especially my training with modern symbolic logic/metalogic! But yes, even philosophy in general I think has some more organic agreement to coding beyond that. The hardest language anyone could grok is probably the First Critique and works like that, and really understanding it is quite akin to the abstract kinds of thinking you need for coding.

and0 5y ago

I can say as someone who fell in love with coding that doing it professionally did not extinguish that fire. Still spent 12 or so hours doing game dev this weekend, and a few hours every night this week. e: To clarify I started learning in 2013ish, became a full-time dev in late 2015. So 6 years later, still finding joy in the day-to-day, but definitely have a special fire for the pipe-dream projects.

EarthLaunch 5y ago
That makes me curious what project you're working on, and you might be interested in my own pipe-dream project! There's a playfulness in doing something seemingly impossible, because succeeding at it simply means having fun playing with it.
- and0 5y ago
  TL;DR multiplayer roguelike (or general tile-based) framework in Typescript https://github.com/and0p/chaos-core https://github.com/and0p/chaos-core
  - EarthLaunch 5y ago
    Oh very cool. You wrote your own ECS. I toyed with ECSY but realized it's not performant for games. Opinionated event messaging hmm. Mine's a low-res MMO client/server in JS. I loved Ultima Online and experimented with 'military' isometric projection, but landed back on 3D.
    - and0 5y ago
      Yeah! More accurately just EC, no real systems here. Roguelikes are highly deterministic and are not real-time, so a system updating all its respective components for every "tick" wouldn't really fit. The biggest obstacle with roguelike development is the way the components that make up an entity have to communicate in an agnostic way. Think if a wizard tries to freeze a warrior, where in the code/flow do you specify if that is or is not allowed? And what happens when you have extreme edge cases like if a specific area, a status applied to a teammate, or some random event nearby maybe says that the warrior is actually immune to being frozen? And what if the wizard's freeze spell is so powerful that it can ignore all of those obstacles? The approach I went with is that the EC side is relatively basic but all the components can optionally tap into a flux/redux-style event system, and those messages are very powerful in how they allow themselves to be modified or permitted/allowed while being deterministic. (And of course the message system allows for easy client/server logic, and super easy unit or integration testing of gameplay systems which hasn't felt like anything I've used before.) I'm quite liking it so far, hoping to have something more concrete in 5-6 months.

indigochill 5y ago

In my particular position as a professional self-taught dev (working as far from SV as possible), I would say it's a bit of a mix for me. I still obsess about code (more my own than work code), but I just don't have the mental bandwidth to code at work and then go full-bore into my own projects as well. I need to do other things with my time off. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking a less mentally draining career to focus my mental energies on my own things, but I also know I don't want to run a startup or think about money in relation to my own projects, so for now I feel like I'm happy with being on this side of the fence (it helps immensely that I happen to like my company and work).

Tade0 5y ago

> (I have an MA in philosophy), Judging by my experience you actually did go to school for it - or at least half of it. I worked with a few PhDs in this field and it appears that it uniquely prepares one for this line of work.

beepbooptheory 5y ago
It's definitely something I would make known/have made known in my resumes/applications, especially my training with modern symbolic logic/metalogic! But yes, even philosophy in general I think has some more organic agreement to coding beyond that. The hardest language anyone could grok is probably the First Critique and works like that, and really understanding it is quite akin to the abstract kinds of thinking you need for coding.