19 ms·

Writing toy software is a joy

820 points by bundie 1y ago

akkartik 1y ago
Ha, these "toys" are quite ambitious. Here are my joyful toys: https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog
Swizec 1y ago
Toy Software is a lot like working on your bike/car/boat/whatever. Working on your bike is fun. Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. I miss writing toy software. It’s fun. But inevitably I want to use said software and that’s where the trouble starts. You find all the bugs and none of the time to fix them.
- kazinator 1y ago
  The easy fix is to have two bikes. You can take the time to work on the offline bike, not to mention get needed parts.
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  I also have more "working software" interests than i have time and energy. Many of them have a ton of mundane boring details i've done a thousand times before. I'm actually a bit excited that i can work on what i want to work on. With that said it's a challenge and a chore on its own to curate what "AI" writes. So it's definitely not all roses. Disclaimer: I'm still early in the experimentation phase. We'll see if i hold these opinions in a few months.
- jona777than 1y ago
  I recently wrote my own invoicing application. I got wrapped up in the joy of adding the features I wanted. Many of these features come at a premium monthly fee for a big named product. I needed to get an invoice out in a timely fashion. As much as I wanted to use my app, I found certain kinks I needed to work out (with styling, adding addresses, etc.) -- This was where I realized what you have articulated. At some point, it becomes better to prioritize the "fun" in working on my bike, and the "usefulness" of the daily driver bike. In doing so, perhaps the fun/usefulness of each converges over time.
  - egometry 1y ago
    Andy Schatz, the independent game creator of Monaco, said something at a GDC talk that really resonated with me along these lines I'm paraphrasing but - "Do the hard work that you need to do, but always give yourself an hour a day for the bullshit 'i don't have time for this but I want to do it' stuff. It'll keep you happy, which will keep you productive through the slog... and those little touches will stand out and make SOME people happy" For the unfamiliar (the man, not the talk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz
- pjc50 1y ago
  I used to self-host my email. I don't any more, for exactly this reason. And of course this applies to every other "just do it yourself!" enthusiast appeal. I actually want to delegate it to someone who does it full time.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Strange example, because self-hosted email has been pretty much setup-and-forget for me. I’ve been hosting my own email for several domains on a $5 VPS for over a decade and it’s largely just hummed along, without needing babysitting. Very rarely, some ISP’s spamblocker gets a little too squirrelly and I have a brief deliverability issue, but those are rare and easy to resolve.
  - npodbielski 1y ago
    What kind of issues you have with it? I am running my own email server for.about 10 years and very rarely have to look at it.
    - reyqn 1y ago
      I heard a lot of people saying hosting your own email server was the best way to be considered as spam by every big email provider. I think it's a big issue, but I've never actually tried it.
    - pjc50 1y ago
      It was Exim on Debian; generally it would chug along fine for months and then incur some sort of regular sysadmin issue that nonetheless needs dealing with. Upgrades. Occasionally, breaking upgrades. Changes to anti-spam rules on other systems causing deliverability issues. ISP mandating IP migration. Earlier in the process it was an actual, physical rackmount server not a VPS, which incurred extra effort a couple of times to replace it. And the big one: inbound anti-spam. It's not that issues are frequent, it's just that there's no guarantee they won't be badly timed. There may come a point in your life where (a) you don't have a lot of free time and (b) you badly need a specific email. I still have the mail domain, I just pay an ISP to handle it for me.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. How about working on your bike that other people also work on daily? That's work.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I dunno. Working on a bike you want to use to ride to work could be stressful if it is your only bike, you need it to get to work, and your manager will be really mad if you don’t show up to work one day. If there was any slip available it wouldn’t be so bad. Actually, I really like this analogy because 1) We can’t really work on non-trivial fixes for our cars because they are too complex 2) We’ve totally structured our living situations around these over-complex beasts 3) Sometimes they do just break down at random, and it becomes a mini-crisis for everyone involved, which can’t really be resolved without missing a day of work to go to a professional 4) The bike is in exactly the same situation, except you can actually fix most bike problems yourself with a little kit And yet, it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car, instead of a bicycle. Some thoughts: Outside of, like, customer service, most places are throughput-oriented and it doesn’t even really matter all that much if somebody misses a day. If we really cared about “uptime” of employees, we’d all be living in bicycle range of our jobs, and able to fix our bikes. Maybe there’d be a bus route as well.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    As someone who's stuck to owning a single bike for over a decade (tho I will probably change this in the coming year) for both athletic rides and commuting, I'll say the "it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car" can sometimes make having a single bike worse. If my bike flats and I'm out of tubes and I have a busy day planned, I have to take it to a local bike shop but those generally close pretty early. If I miss the window to take it to an LBS then I'm SOL. With a car there's generally a developed enough ecosystem that I can get a roadside assistance type service to put a spare on the car until I can actually get my car into a shop. This is a good analogy for SaaS vs using a tinkerer tool. A tinkerer tool often can be customized exactly to your needs. I can work on my bike at 10 PM in my garage after dinner as long as I have the parts. But sometimes your tinkerer tool is going to leave you working all night or you'll be SOL. But SaaS is generally a full-time job for other folks. Sure you pay money, but there's fewer situations you're SOL. (Personally when my bike is inop and I need to head to work I use transit.)
    - patrickmay 1y ago
- DustinBrett 1y ago
  This is why I love building a personal website. It's like a live playground.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  I actually only like working on software that has a real use, at least to myself. The coolest is when I spin something up fast at work and people start relying on it. Same goes for my car, it's satisfying doing inexpensive fixes to keep it running. Wouldn't want some mid-2000s BMW project that's stuck in the garage half the time.
- 65 1y ago
  I really just write software for myself only. The time difference (and fun level) between writing software for yourself and writing production quality software is huge. Feature doesn't work in Safari? Who cares, I don't use Safari anyway. No need to fix.
- xmprt 1y ago
  Perfect example for me is that I use beancount for tracking my finances. It broke one day because I tried upgrading some dependencies from v2 to v3. I tried messing around with the imports and some function names but it didn't help and after wasting 30m I decided to give up on the upgrade. 2 weeks later when I wasn't busy trying to get it to work, I gave it another shot. This time went so much more smoothly and now everything works (fingers crossed since I haven't actually tried out ALL the functionality).
asicsp 1y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284291 (117 points | 8 days ago | 28 comments) Seems like the link changed, and thus not caught by the dupe detector.
- zesterer 1y ago
  Apologies, I overhauled the entire website (backend and all). I wrote a post about it, if you're curious.
rubicon33 1y ago
> In 2025, the beauty and craft of writing software is being eroded. AI is threatening to replace us (or, at least, the most joyful aspects of our craft) and software development is being increasingly commodified, measured, packaged, and industrialised. Software development needs more simple joy, and I’ve found that creating toy programs is a great way to remember why I started working with computers again. Sad but true. I especially feel that comment about losing the most “joyful” part.
- danielbln 1y ago
  I have more joy than ever working on toy software while using LLMs. My joy comes from building things, thinking architecture, components, creative solutions that create something new and exciting. Hand-setting lines of code is NOT what brings me joy personally, it's a means to an end. Dancing with agentic LLMs is so much fun to me. I can however understand that if the code part is what brings you joy, then we're probably not moving in a direction that pleases you. For those of us who like to build, first and foremost, it's heaven.
  - tines 1y ago
    I don't think the hand-setting lines of code is really the part that brings these people joy, the joy is in understanding. LLM-like tools do not create understanding in the user, who is farming out the understanding in order to get results quickly. I understand the draw and usefulness of this, but just clarifying, it's not the typing that matters, it's what is going on (or not going on) in one's mind.
- klabb3 1y ago
  > AI is threatening to replace us (or, at least, the most joyful aspects of our craft) I don’t like this either but every time I use LLMs it feels like we’re talking about completely different things. It moves waaay to fast and makes bad decisions at every turn, if I accepted them all it would be complexity deadlock within a week tops. Pooping out boilerplate sure but then you’re generally holding it wrong anyway (or there’s an opportunity to automate things). Plus even if you don’t have the time to automate it, sure, but then are you enjoying the act of shitting out your own boilerplate? Out of the things I consider fun the LLM is at best a good rubber duck. It needs constant hand-holding, sometimes polluting the context window (and physical space) with a barrage of poorly written code. Code is bad, we’re trying to minimize it. No? At least that’s how I think: what’s the minimum* amount of code that can solve this problem? *: minimum in a brain complexity sense, not char count. They correlate strongly though
thomascountz 1y ago
GameBoy Advance game (difficulty = 3/10, time = 2 weeks) Wow! Physics engine (difficulty = 5/10, time = 1 week) What?? Threaded Virtual Machine (difficulty = 6/10, time = 1 week) I— POSIX shell (difficulty = 4/10, time = 3-5 days) Ok... I can't believe this person :D But regardless of the time estimates, I appreciate the idea!
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  I was going to make a similar comment. This list is fine, but the times are all over the place. If they removed those estimates it'd be a much better list. If a hash map takes 3-5 days for someone, they aren't making a threaded VM in 7 days.
- tuveson 1y ago
  I have to assume the author listed these times based on how long it would take for someone to follow along with the blogs that they linked to, which demonstrate stripped down simple versions of these things. Like the POSIX shell example just implements a few basic things, but leaves out a lot (and says so).
  - zesterer 1y ago
    This is the point, yes! Toy software is not production-worthy. It might not even be sufficient for your own personal use. It's about building proof of concepts and rapidly scouting out the terrain of a field you don't know much about, and getting a souvenir to remember the experience with. Oftentimes I find that I enjoy one of the projects so much that I take it further than 'toy', but that usually ups the time estimate by an order of magnitude.
- simonw 1y ago
  This person is a game developer who works on an open source voxel RPG https://github.com/veloren/veloren https://github.com/veloren/veloren - take their estimates with that in mind!
rybosome 1y ago
This is quite an impressive list, and many of the things ranking low in difficulty for the author would have been quite high for me. It's definitely inspiring, makes me want to dust off a toy of my own. That said, I feel the conclusion on learning with LLMs deserves some more nuance. It really depends on how you use them. This is a terrible prompt for learning: > Implement this solution for me This is an AMAZING prompt for learning: > Please give me an overview of ELF. Focus on the highest level abstractions, more of the 'why' than the 'how' Certainly one can argue that it takes something away, in that you did not have to conduct the research yourself whenever a question occurred. However, if you are engaging in honest intellectual work (i.e. really thinking), then having a Socratic teacher always ready to discuss your questions is a profound accelerant to the learning process.
- zesterer 1y ago
  I think what you've identified is the "certain kinds of learning" I mention in the post. If I want to learn about the structure of ELF binaries, I don't figure it out from first principles. I can't: the decisions that went into its design where highly specific to its history and the sensibilities of its creators, and in a modern context a lot of those decisions are near enough random. These are the sorts of things you should use specs, docs, Google, and maybe an LLM for. What I'm talking about is, I guess, 'constructive' learning. I might not be able to build my own ELF parser through guesswork, but I probably can write a binary format of my own and a simple OS kernel to read it, given enough time. It probably won't look much like ELF, but the process of discovery that'll happen will teach me about why ELF came to be and what problems is solving, and also about the wider design space that sits around it. My suggestion is that you should not use an LLM's help for the latter. I like to think of it this way: if you bolted me to a chair in a room with nothing but a laptop, a text editor, and a compiler, what might I be able to create if you left me for 10 years? What couldn't I create because I wouldn't have sufficient implementation-specific information?
roughly 1y ago
One of the best things that I’ve done for myself, career-wise, came during a 6-month sabbatical between jobs. I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to do, but I kept finding myself stymied by scope creep - when you don’t have any constraints, it’s hard to decide how big a project should be, and the projects would grow to these massive unfinishable beasts. I decided to constrain myself to one week per project - whatever I could get done in a week was what I’d do for this project. The experience of going from zero to something useable in either a new language or a new framework or a new field in a week was enormously confidence-building - learning that I was actually pretty good at this whole programming thing and breaking through a bunch of walls I’d run into previously in my professional career gave me an incredible amount of trust in myself to be able to take on new challenges that really helped me when I was looking for a new job. At the same time, it reminded me what I loved about programming - in a week, I was able to build something that solved a problem I had or that someone I knew had, and I got to do so in a creative and intellectually challenging fashion. If ever you find yourself in a position to take a couple months off between jobs, skip the leetcoding or whatever else and just build some toy projects - you’ll be amazed how much you already know.
- jonator 1y ago
  I've done the same, but with AI generating a lot of the boilerplate, and helping generate automated tests, has accelerated this process considerably.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  I would just add that gen AI can actually be a fantastic aid when you're building some toy projects just for yourself. I am primarily a backend engineer, though I am capable on the front end, just not particularly fast. I am especially slow at the voodoo that is CSS. In the past, I would have been turned off from doing some end-to-end personal projects because I know I would have been bogged down just battling CSS for hours and hours (it's particularly problematic that I'm slow at CSS but also a stickler for how I want things to look). With AI tools I can literally just say "make it pretty". It gets me about 85% of the way there, but importantly it gets me to the point where it puts in all the styling framework and then I just have to fix bugs/edit/tweak it, which goes very quickly. So now I've found myself much more likely to build personal projects because I know I can get past things that in the past felt a bit like quicksand to me.
ravenstine 1y ago
One thing I've learned about building toy software projects or even just small personal software (stuff that's actually useful) is to avoid implementing flexible configuration engines. I used to fall into this trap where I thought I should make my software to be configuration-centric so that it would be usable for others in case I decided to make my code FOSS. The problem with that is making a configuration engine is a lot less efficient than just writing the code to do the damn thing. I've almost never shared any code outside of small libraries that were very low in complexity, and I wasted a lot of time writing code for other hypothetical people when I should have just been writing it for myself.
- dockercompost 1y ago
  A rite of passage! :D
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- bob1029 1y ago
  > The problem with that is making a configuration engine is a lot less efficient than just writing the code to do the damn thing. http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complex... It took me a solid decade to accept these lessons. I cannot build a product that even remotely competes with things like Visual Studio and .NET tooling. How many hours would it take a solo developer to recreate a debugger experience that anyone else could be bothered to look at for more than 5 seconds? The hardest part of building something configurable is the UI/UX. The moment you step outside of the host language, your tooling support goes to zero. Sure, you can pick other popular languages as the language of configuration (SQL, python, Lua, etc.) and piggyback off those ecosystems. But, you still have to build a way for a "non programmer" to visit all of the patchwork sites of "configuration" in a coherent way. Telling the business people to go edit a folder full of .py and .sql files will probably not be received well. Wrapping all of this with a fancy web interface doesn't make the problem less severe either (it makes it substantially worse). If you have a way to build/deploy your product in <60 seconds from source, worrying about elaborate configuration and customization architecture seems extremely idiotic to me now. The best path I've found is something approximating a common library and a per-customer executable that consumes it and implements the expected contracts. Each customer's project lives in a subfolder on the same monorepo. The power of the hierarchical filesystem is tragically understated throughout our industry.
declan_roberts 1y ago
This is one thing I don't get about the LLM people. For most of us who are professionals, writing software is not very hard, and it is in fact fun! I don't need to let a computer write my software. I already know how, and I enjoy it. I need the computer to do the hard part (gathering requirements, speaking with stakeholders, etc). Software is a joy.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  There are several sources of joy in programming. Some lean more toward the process and exploration of the problem domain, others more toward the outcome and impact. I had a shift of perspective at some point where I realized that software wasn't just fun to create, but you can solve problems with it, including your own, which is incredibly rewarding and kinda feels like wizardry. Ultimately I find both to be enjoyable, though in terms of career and life outcomes, focusing on solving real problems and producing tangible outcomes has had more of an impact than noodling with neat implementations that nobody but me cared about. Turns out if you solve your own problems (or just publicly work toward solving them), there are often other people who also struggle with the sam problems, who may throw money your way ;-)
heroku 1y ago
Reinventing existing software has 0 merit. If you cannot be creative enough to invent new things, you shouldn't bother working.
- simonw 1y ago
  That's rubbish. Reinventing existing software as a learning exercise has plenty of merit.
  - coolThingsFirst 1y ago
    No it doesnt. Build new things or dont waste your time. Learning exercise lol.
    - imchillyb 1y ago
      I don't believe you understand the word iteration, why that word exists, or the benefits it provides to society in general.
- amunozo 1y ago
  How are you supposed to learn to invent new things if you don't know how existing things work?
  - coolThingsFirst 1y ago
    There's ZERO room for innovation in the projects suggested. Wanna do some creative thinking? Read some books, learn how normal people think. Explore latest datasets. That's where the meat is. 98% of what you read online has been written by super uncreative(boring) people. They have no imagination whatsoever, IQ is well statistically speaking not too flattering. Internet is ran by the bottom. It's slop by the bottom, for the bottom. So you need to hang out with creative people. Tech people write the most boring blog posts because it's aimed at getting hired. Nothing of substance is shared. That's why gwern stands out like a sore thumb. The majority of human beings are incapable of creative thought.
didip 1y ago
Big time! Almost all of my interesting knowledge came from toy projects I made to solve my own problems (or zero problem solved but it was fun so I did it anyway). For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and AWS EC2. And then as the "customer app", I run CockroachDB, rqlite, and tiDB on it (one at a time, I don't want to burn money for this). It was janky, zero SLA, I likely mis-tuned all the databases, and cost a bit of money :(. But it totally worked, all the db nodes can discover each other. I was satisfied and that's enough. Another example would be writing my own Raft-backed database, similar to the ToyDB Rust project posted here. Is the DB useful? No. But it is so much fun and I learned a lot. My AWS S3 bucket and private Git repo are a graveyard full of toy projects. My own Dropbox clone, Pinterest clone, Delicious clone, subset of Google Maps clone, etc. etc. are all RIP in there.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud Can I ask what you had running on that cluster?
  - didip 1y ago
    As of right now? Nothing important. If I want to use it day-to-day, then I have to care about SLA, then I have to be the sysadmin of that thing. Not exactly fun :) What's interesting is that the TailScale network allows the local daemon be exposed on the internet with small settings change. Pretty revolutionary for personal/home IoT projects.
- otoolep 1y ago
  rqlite[1] creator here, happy to answer any questions. If you're interested in writing Raft-backed databases you might be interested in my talk at GopherCon 2023. It walks through doing exactly that, step by step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbxQ1Epi5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbxQ1Epi5w [1] https://rqlite.io https://rqlite.io
falcor84 1y ago
I love that attitude! This is essentially my preferred answer to "what would people do in a post-AGI world when they don't need to work any more".
oconnor663 1y ago
> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate. I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our advice for getting help from AI is different from our advice for getting help from other humans. It would be kind of odd, wouldn't it, to put a paragraph at the bottom of a blog post that said "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." I think there are two clear reasons that feels odd: 1) expert friends can actually answer your questions and get you personally unstuck, which is huge, and 2) expert friends usually understand why you're doing what you're doing and that they're supposed to help do it yourself instead of just doing it for you. One thing I bet few people have tried (because I haven't tried it myself) is actually asking an LLM to guide you like an expert friend would, instead of just spitting out code to solve your problem. Maybe they're bad at that, I wouldn't be surprised. But if so, I bet in a year or two they'll be amazing at it. It might be good to build the habit of clarifying what sort of help you need, instead of assuming an LLM will give you the wrong kind of help?
- leeoniya 1y ago
  > "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." AI is not an expert programmer [today]. and it doesnt take an expert programmer to arrive at that conclusion.
  - superb_dev 1y ago
    I also bet your expert programmer friend is give you pointers and not writing the whole thing for you
  - hbn 1y ago
    Call it whatever you want, it helps me get unstuck when my dependencies aren't getting along, or when I need to figure out what's wrong with my usage of an API I'm not familiar with, or why my build won't startup based on the code and the vague error message, etc. I don't care if it's a human or a robot telling me, I just want to get unstuck and I've been getting unstuck more since the advent of LLMs than in the rest of my programming career. Digging through bad documentation and Googling for old form posts of similar-but-not-quite-the-same-issues was always the worst part of programming to me, and I'm glad there's a tool that finally solved that problem.
vinceguidry 1y ago
I'm writing a shell right now in ruby after seeing a few other folks doing so and looking at the current state of shell development and not finding anything I really liked. It is indeed, a lot of fun. Using Vidar's really quite nice text editor to do so is equally pleasurable. https://github.com/vidarh/re https://github.com/vidarh/re Got a few PRs for you when you get to this, friend.
hu3 1y ago
I've written a ton of throwaway toy applications for personal use. The tip I can share is: publish them on GitHub. You'll find out some of them are useful to a lot of people. I have multiple toy repos with 20+ stars and one with 200+ stars. Just put one screenshot and simple instructions to run on README.md, no need to write a manual. As simple as `npm install && npm run start` is enough instruction for most. The screenshot is important tho.
- simonw 1y ago
  This is also a great way to stand out among other candidates in the resume-review stage of a hiring process. The number one question I have as a hiring manager is always "can this person actually write code". A GitHub profile with 2-3 projects with multiple commits to each one answers that question really well. I won't filter out people who don't have that - lots of great engineers have never published code before - but the people who do have that are much more likely to get picked for the phone screen.
  - thrtythreeforty 1y ago
    The converse is actually a negative signal for me. If you list a GitHub profile on your resume, but that GitHub profile is a ghost town consisting exclusively of "test repo please ignore" and "freshman-year assignments I was required to fork from professor's repo," that tells me you don't have an above-average understanding of why you add something to your resume. If you don't have an impressive GitHub profile, that's fine. To your point - the absence of it is not a penalty, and the presence of a good one is a very positive signal. But the presence of one that turns out to be a dud is a negative.
    - simonw 1y ago
      It partly depends on the level I'm hiring for. A junior candidate with a GitHub profile full of obvious tutorial projects still helps me skip putting them through FizzBuzz. A senior candidate with a ghost town could reflect poorly on them.
    - 1y ago
notepad0x90 1y ago
I have a couple of projects like this and I'm not sure if they'll ever see the light of day. I enjoy writing code, simple as that. Only a small part of my day job is coding, but honestly, it's more like a hobby than anything. The whole thing with getting people to like your work, using it for clout or padding your resume has an appeal to it that I won't dismiss, but all that takes the fun out of it. I just don't have much else I actually enjoy in life, so ruining it with peer-pressure, chasing clout, impressing people, worrying about career prospects is a buzz-kill. I used to think that if I am passionate about something like this and I get really good at it, maybe it will help my career and prospects but the real world doesn't work that way. it sucks the joy, fun and passion out of you if you let it. All that to say it is perfectly fine to like coding for the sake of enjoying it and nothing more. Others play a sport (or watch it), work on arts & crafts, or raise chickens or whatever, I code. I am not particularly skilled or great at coding either, I just enjoy it, and that's it. If you have fun coding, be protective of your joy! even if you don't take it to the extreme like I do. that's my only point.
- ethinton 1y ago
  I love this take, and I’m reminded of the important idea that while we all are encouraged to be productive, our own joy is also an important thing for us to produce.
kgwxd 1y ago
I've abandoned tons of toy code but I have 1 thing I wrote in a weekend for myself that I've been mostly blindly using ever since. I just realized while typing this that it's been 8 years. It's a Firefox add-on that I only published to the "store" because running a local-only add-on is a PITA. It takes regex(s), searches attribute values and/or inner text, and applies a given CSS rule to elements that match. The UI is awful (regex escaped to be inside a json string escaped to be inside a textarea all parsed by javascript) but I know how to use it. It can probably be used for many things, but I just use it to set visibility: none on elements that link to sites I don't ever want to see (facebook, twitter, linkedin, popular pay/register-walled sites, etc). For example, my HN and reddit views just have blank lines where links any of those sites would normally be. For the most part, I add a site once, and forget they ever existed (except when their CEOs do awful things).
dwh452 1y ago
What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Here's a few disorganized thoughts in good faith 1. Because half her friends and family are on iOS, and that means fighting the App Store. (This is a social problem essentially, in fighting Apple) 2. Because networking is hard. How would you have shared recipes with a computer in the C64 days? Email? BBS? (There are partial technical solutions to this, but they would require people to run something like friend-to-friend overlay networks) 3. Because most stuff happens in web browsers and that means pay-to-play, or vendor lock-in, or using AWS free tier and being a programmer. (Ass, grass, or cash, nobody hosts for free. Friend-to-friend networks may also help with this) 4. Because a recipe manager with sharing is best implemented as just emailing your recipes to your friends and storing them as txt files locally. Anything more complicated is beyond the scope of a Visual Basic-style drag-and-drop WYSIWYG anyway 5. When was drag-and-drop enough? The widgets need code behind them to save and open files, right? 6. You might be kinda onto something, and the longer I write async code I more I think the programming world is ready for another big pruning. Like when structured programming said "No goto, no long jumps, if-else and exceptions is all you need", we might be ready for "A single control thread which never blocks and never awaits, and delegates to worker tasks, is all you need until you are building some C100k shit"
- jlarocco 1y ago
  > Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family? Because there's no money in it.
- hathawsh 1y ago
  I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would be making deployment extremely simple, reliable, and safe.
dakiol 1y ago
> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official documentation of each db, forums, blog posts, stackoverflow entries, etc. It was time consuming on the searching side. The time it took to read all the sources was fine for me (it's learning time, so that's always welcomed). Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". So, I get a quick overview of what to keep an eye on, and the references are there to avoid relying on hallucination. It's true that sometimes I go ahead and say "give me a data schema for storing photos metadata in postgres. I wanna keep X in a different table, though" (or something like that). But I do that because I know very well what the output should look like (I just don't wanna spend time typing it, and sometimes I forget the actual type that I should use (int vs integer?)).
- Viliam1234 1y ago
  > Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will only be about proper framing and emphasis, etc.
  - pietmichal 1y ago
    This was already a problem in a world without LLMs. Reputation is the only human mechanism that mitigates this.
    - SpaceNoodled 1y ago
      It's seriously exacerbated by smug LLMs.
cdelsolar 1y ago
I love the article but disagree with the final point. It wasn't until LLMs came out that my toy projects have all been greatly upgraded with features and functionality. I simply didn't have time to do so before.
- zesterer 1y ago
  The point is not the final product, the point is the process.
coolThingsFirst 1y ago
Waste of time, you wont impress anyone because there are no more software jobs left. Go to gym.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Who am I impressing at the gym? The weights have already been lifted
  - coolThingsFirst 1y ago
    So you don't look like sh* that's more impressive than cranking out code that absolutely no one cares about. Especially things that have been done 100s of times.
    - z0r 1y ago
      Please work out. But also please write software if you want to improve your skills.
  - coolThingsFirst 1y ago
    udk what you're missing out if you aren't in the gym twice a week.
munificent 1y ago
An anecdote about how a toy project _really_ helped me out: I work on Dart professionally. I've also been tinkering on a toy programming language that may never see the light of day. My toy language has gone through several incarnations but a while back I was working on adding algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, and exhaustiveness checking to it. The canonical algorithm for exhaustiveness checking is this paper by Luc Maranget: http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/warn/warn.pdf http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/warn/warn.pdf When I first started dabbling in programming languages over a decade ago, I tried to understand that paper for weeks and just could not wrap my head around it. I don't have much of a formal CS background and that paper was impenetrable to me. So here I am tinkering on my toy programming language and I run into again. I give it another try and laboriously implement it in my interpreter, basically doing a straight translation. I don't understand the code, but it seems to sort of work. So then I start refactoring it a tiny bit at a time into a style that fits the way I think about code. Eventually the algorithm sort of folds into itself and before I know it, I finally understand how it works. The end result was only a page or so of code, but my toy language had real exhaustiveness checking work. Meanwhile, at work, I am working on adding pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking to Dart [1]. Exhaustiveness checking here is a much harder proposition because Dart has subtyping, unlike my toy language and the ML languages that Maranget's paper works on. I'd been hacking away at an exhaustiveness algorithm for Dart based on a couple of papers about Scala's approach but they were sort of approximative and inelegant (in my opinion, maybe they are a great fit for Scala). But once I understood Maranget's algorithm from implementing it in my toy project, it finally clicked for me how it could be adapted to work with subtyping in a sound, coherent way. I wrote it up as quickly as I could and (with a lot of additional help from a teammate to handle generics), that became the algorithm we shipped: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0/patterns/exhaustiveness.md https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0... It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't coincidentally been working on a toy pattern matching implementation at home. [1]: https://dart.dev/language/patterns https://dart.dev/language/patterns
- zesterer 1y ago
  I love this, this is exactly the sort of thing I've experienced too: building the toy project gave me an on-ramp to something similar but much more complicated in the future.
aldousd666 1y ago
I've done a lot of these kinds of projects. I got really sucked into a rabbit hole with the parser/interpreter/compiler that I was stuck (happily) in "I need to understand this so I will build one" mode. I eventually built a database server and query language for it. (for a business) This was in 2009, but I highly identify with his method of learning by doing for fun!
jekwoooooe 1y ago
I agree. It’s fun to just write code to solve problems or even for fun. I love go (it’s the best all around language and it’s not even close) so for fun I wrote a game engine and a small game that I might try to turn into an actual game. It’s good to keep fresh. I’ve also tried to do llm free days
ppqqrr 1y ago
Problem/Truth is that writing toy software is not profitable - that's not to say one must always work on profitable things; what i mean is that it's being kept unprofitable, because in a hyper-saturated monopolized attention economy, every piece of "toy" software that isn't a video game or a plugin to some proprietary app ecosystem is essentially an act of subversion, an attempted "theft" or piracy of what the Company considers its rightful property: the sum of all disposable human attention.
- zesterer 1y ago
  That sounds as good a reason as any to become a pirate, frankly
linsomniac 1y ago
>Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. [...] But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. I agree. However: Your best bet is likely to build it by hand and then see if you can get an LLM to build it. It is looking like we are living in a world where an important tool to have in your toolbox is going to be the skills and experience of working with the LLM/AI tooling. There are skills, knowledge, tools, tips and techniques that you need to develop to effectively use these tools, just like the honing you get from writing the code. Over just the last half hour I did a brain dump of "hot tips" to a friend of mine who is just starting to use Claude Code to kick-start him. The LLMs are REALLY good at writing small toy programs, and at the end of the day it's great to have little tools that you'll use every day.
_benton 1y ago
Possibly tangential, but I've really been enjoying writing software with very minimal tech stacks with no dependencies (or very few). Go works well for this, but really any language that lets you create a file and just start writing straightforward code is sufficient. As soon as I need to use some CLI to scaffold out a project with tens or hundreds of files, or pull in a ton of dependencies, I kind of check out. It's fine when you have a team and a big serious project, but in my free time I really just enjoy having a couple files of straightforward code and that's it.
josefresco 1y ago
Vibe coding via Claude has re-ignited my passion for fun, side programming projects. After a few false starts, I figured out the tooling, processes and in just a few weeks I've built several apps and I'm having new ideas consistently: -Family calendar/weather dashboard -Bluesky reader that allows you to hide posts you've "seen" -Work PM dashboard to make time tracking more gamified and dare I say... fun? -Chrome Reddit extension that hides posts after viewing for X seconds -A WordPress plugin to replace a plugin no longer maintained What I love and had to get used to was looking/using these apps and being happy with them being only 90%. Initially I had Claude make many UI enhancements but I learned to just let most stuff go and focus on the function and building new stuff, not refinement.
- snarf21 1y ago
  I struggle with Claude fixing a bug and not giving me the updated output. Like explicitly having to ask it for the fix 6 times while it insists the update is in the output. Did you ever have that happen?
  - rokkamokka 1y ago
    Personally, I just fix the bug myself. It's way less aggravating for me than prompting back and forth many times.
  - dpkirchner 1y ago
    I haven't seen this, unless I don't understand exactly what you mean. I can ask it questions about my code and get answers most easily if I explicitly say "don't write any code".
  - josefresco 1y ago
    I read some good advice: give Claude 3 bites at the apple and then burn the session and start over. I find if Claude doesn't get it ready the first or second time the chances of a successful outcome drop considerably. Also "Projects" was a nice low setup way of giving context.
    - 1y ago
AutistiCoder 1y ago
I know writing "toy" software has exposed me to new tools I might not have otherwise even known about. I can't afford much n the way of software, so I've been trying to learn to make do with FOSS.
bitwize 1y ago
Ever since Nintendo let the mask slip and got up to their old evil bullshit with the Switch 2 launch, I decided to dust off the solution my teenage self came up with: I'll just play the video games I write. Even if they're small and amateurish, they're worlds and experiences crafted personally for me. And I don't have to pay a cent for them, let alone put up with "key carts", DRM bullshit, or we-can-remotely-brick-your-console bullshit. I'm sure I'll keep buying commercial games from companies with reasonable terms (GOG, maybe?). But writing my own is great fun. It'd be nice if someone else enjoys them, but they're mainly for my own enjoyment. Oh, and I "vibe code" the old fashioned way: with a REPL and some chill tunes.
- tanjtanjtanj 1y ago
  What sort of evil bullshit did Nintendo get up to with the Switch 2 launch? I don't follow gaming news.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    1) High prices for the console and games, which may be partially explained by inflation, but still, shit's steep. We're back to the early 90s days of scouring pawnshops for deals and carefully considering which few games we really want to buy. Plus, $10 for a sales demo (Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour). 2) Console must be registered online before becoming playable in handheld mode. 3) Nintendo recently released a terms of service update in which they reserve the right to disable your console if they catch you violating acceptable use. Switch 2s found using piracy carts have not yet been bricked this way, only locked out of internet play (like original Switches were), but still... 4) Some Switch 2 games will not get a physical release, only a cartridge which provides an "activation key" for a digitally downloaded game. Why even bother with this bullshit, I don't know, because it's all of the downsides of physical media and all of the downsides of digital downloads, with none of the upsides of either. On a console.
eliasdorneles 1y ago
I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours per day. I feel most of those projects would take significant time researching and learning about the subjects, before even starting to code. Example: recently I replaced my Pelican blog by my own hacky static site generator written in Odin, working 2-3h per day, it took me 2 weeks -- and this is a simpler project than many on that list.
- sowbug 1y ago
  Your project is vastly more specified than a toy project, because it has a real customer (you) who will expect it to work after it ships. That expectation is what separates toys from real tools. I bet you could write a word processor in an hour. It might only add or delete one character at a time (no selections). It might persist only to a hard-coded "output.txt" filename. You might have to kill the process because there's no quit operation. But that would suffice for a toy word processor.
  - eliasdorneles 1y ago
    Fair point, my example was indeed "shipped to production" and may not compare a throwaway static generator toy project. I still think those estimates are off, because I think many of those projects would need significant research and learning time, possibly more than actually coding -- not to mention time spent troubleshooting when something goes wrong.
- orthoxerox 1y ago
  I think that if you interpret "X days" as "24*X hours" this list becomes much more realistic.
  - sc68cal 1y ago
    Who does that though
alanbernstein 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment in theory, but the time pressures of adult life make this difficult. > What I cannot create, I do not understand I suspect Mr Feynman would have phrased this a bit differently if he had first-hand experience with the modern front-end technology treadmill.
bowsamic 1y ago
If you're allowed! Apple says no
purplesyringa 1y ago
I'm surprised by the number of bad takes on LLMs in this thread. LLMs spoon-feed you with information about how things are implemented. You are not supposed to know how everything works when you start these projects. You're supposed to try your best, inevitably fail, then research the topic and understand where you went wrong, then adjust your approach. If you know how everything works and just follow the tutorial, you won't know what makes other methods fail, and by proxy what makes the one you chose work. Write a language parser with a regex. Find out that it can't parse recursive statements. You've now learnt that regex can only parse a specific subset of syntaxes. Try to workaround this by pattern-matching the most nested statement first. Find out that it blows up performance. You now know more about time complexity and know what to watch out for when you write a real parser. Write a non-optimizing compiler from scratch. Find out that you can't make do with unsound optimizations because you can't keep track of what optimizations are applied where. Find out that implementing sound optimizations is hard because you need to track use-def chains. Then you'll understand why SSA is used. Find out that code motion is a mess. Learn about sea of nodes. Merge every optimization pass into one because you're unable to order passes right. Learn how e-graphs solve this. Write a layout engine. Get stuck on being unable to define what a "width" is. Workaround this with min/max/natural widths, introduce binary search, etc. Learn how this stuff works in practice (this is something I haven't personally done yet). They say we learn from mistakes. Please don't let the smart (or "smart", depending on how you look at it) machine stop you from making them. It's not a teacher and it doesn't know how to educate.
- foretop_yardarm 1y ago
  A lot of people say if you don’t use LLMs then you will fall behind. I’m starting to think that not using them will be a significant advantage in the long run.
  - tines 1y ago
    IMO we are going to see a large class of people who have cognitive deficits brought on by AI tool usage. I've been wondering lately about how to distinguish between tools that enhance your cognitive ability, and tools that degrade it. Jobs called a computer a "bicycle for the mind," and it seems like LLMs are an easy-chair for the mind. I'm not sure a priori how to distinguish between the two classes of tools though. Maybe there is no other tool like an LLM.
b0a04gl 1y ago
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tayo42 1y ago
I'm always mixed on this. In the moment it can be fun. In the end when it inevitably feels useless, idk it feels bad. Like I spent a ton of time on something and get some knowledge out of it. It doesn't make my job better and I guess doesn't improve my situation much. My rust sub-directory feels like a digital closet of rpis collecting dust. The things I find fun writing and learning about and the tools I use to do it are so disconnected from anything i do professionally.
diegomacario 1y ago
I did this for years to learn computer graphics. I spent so many weekends and evenings building weird things that never made me a single dollar, but all the knowledge I gained eventually led to the job of my dreams. Here are some of the weird things I built: - Tiny ray-tracer: https://github.com/diegomacario/Super-Sunshine https://github.com/diegomacario/Super-Sunshine - 2D rigid-body simulator: https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics - Character animation system: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Experiments/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Experiments/public/... - Animation curve visualizer: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Magic/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Magic/public/index.... - Motion capture playback in the web: https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index... That's a mountain of code that served one purpose: to gain knowledge.
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
I don't really get a lot of joy out of building copies of things other people have done better than me before. Almost by definition, no list of cool toy projects is going to appeal to me for that reason. I might like the techniques or algorithms employed within them, but frankly if I'm after that kind of knowledge I just find Leetcode and traditional studying to be both higher value and more fun. But I do like writing programs in some strange new, non-CS domain where very little software to address my very particular needs already exists. Most of the software I've written in the last few years has been of this kind, for the purposes of learning Finnish. It is amazing what a few shell scripts, fzf wrappers, and well-timed calls to an LLM can do for accelerating one's own learning process.
xixixao 1y ago
Overengineering is a joy. Using LLMs is a joy. Building something novel, bespoke, something you wouldn’t do when ruthlessly prioritizing for profit.
heikkilevanto 1y ago
The first example in the article, a regex engine, clicked for me. I had read the book on beautiful code #, and the first short story was about a regex thing by none other than Dennis Ritchie. As Fate would have it, my job required me to make a tool for web scraping. Inspired by that book I created a pattern matching language for dom trees. And a click and point tool to create those patterns. At the best time or company had a full time person maintaining maybe 10k patterns to scrape days from library catalogs... It was not a toy project, but it did feel like, even if I got paid to do it. # Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"
- cellularmitosis 1y ago
  Took a minute to track that down (Oran is spelled Oram?) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/9780596510046/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/97805965...
Lerc 1y ago
I added up a score for myself from that list giving me one point for something that more-or-less matches an item from this list and a half point for something vaguely similar. I got 15.5 The compiler, chess engine, and text-editor have been targets for years but I haven't quite gotten around to doing them. I like the idea of the bitwise challenge. I had been thinking that another challenge that I'd like to see (and have a go at) might be a plotPixel Challenge. Make a game that does all rendering with PlotPixel(x : int, y : int, color:??? ) NextFrame(offScreen:boolean = true, clearNow:boolean =true, clearColor:??? =0) Unsure on byte for 256 indexed color or 32 bit for setting 24 bit color from ARGB as r= rA+R, g=gA+G, b=b*A+B. It would be easy enough to test if a game obeyed the rules because a full video capture of the game should be possible by intercepting just those functions. Perhaps a (generous) source code size constraint to stop people going too crazy. (maybe 64/128/256k source-code, zipped). Not for code golfing as much as to avoid people trying to squeeze Crysis though a straw.
nektro 1y ago
love the spirit of the article, the time frames listed are quite unrealistic however
- glouwbug 1y ago
  I’d triple the estimates, really. For example a game boy emulator is not trivial; there are far too many edge cases with a zilog. Chip8 would better fit for that time frame.
djmips 1y ago
Consider it like exercise. Pro atheletes train and exercise. Pro software developers should train and exercise their craft.
ericyd 1y ago
I really like the idea purposed here but none of these projects are even remotely interesting to me. It's moments like this when I start to question whether or not I'm losing my love of programming.
- osmsucks 1y ago
  Perhaps. I scanned the list and most of them sound like interesting projects that I would like to tackle at some point (or that I have tackled in the past for "fun"). Honestly, I think I was in your same position until recently, then I had some time off work thanks to the newborn and decided to start a "simple" coding project. Since it was purely for fun and to challenge myself, I decided to try and avoid bringing in any dependencies and wrote everything from scratch. This made it much larger and more complex than I had initially anticipated, but despite that (or, maybe, because of that?) I longed for those few hours when I could tinker on my project. Coding suddenly became fun again. Maybe you're just a bit burnt out?
  - ericyd 1y ago
    Definitely a possibility
zazazx 1y ago
Software is like baseball. Never stop practicing.
scarface_74 1y ago
It seems to be an unpopular opinion here. But the last thing I want to do when I get off of work is touch a computer. I haven’t desired to be a hobbyist developer nor have I written a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since the day I walked across the stage with my CS degree in 1996. I was hobbyist for 10 years before then. Life is too short to spend in front of computer. Writing software funds my joy.
andreygrehov 1y ago
My kids (7-10yo) are currently learning programming. I’m debating if I should show them the LLM. Leaning towards no :)
mathewshen 1y ago
Agree and that's why I create https://github.com/ai-glimpse https://github.com/ai-glimpse
admiralrohan 1y ago
Good list of projects. I have to disagree on the point on usage of LLMs. These projects are going to be sideprojects and with busy schedule it might get tough to find motivation. Using LLMs for some of the parts can give the momentum required to continue. We can also learn from studying the output generated by LLMs.
animal531 1y ago
>An ECS framework, 1-2 weeks That gave me a good chuckle. Yeah look, you can change your data layout to be in more of an ECS format, make some optimizations and call it a day; but in reality you're still going to be pretty far from the real thing. I can say this because I've been working on one for some months now, of course I'm going for a production build and also to turn it into a Unity asset that's worthy of being sold, so it's going to require a lot more effort. The goal of mine is to ensure that its extremely simple to use (which Units DOTS totally fails at) while still being as efficient as possible. Some notable things I've had to do for this project: - I have a tool releasing on the Unity asset store (currently being vetted) that performs optimization for you, e.g. you give it a variable such as an int, a range of let's say 1..1024; then it'll automatically time your code while searching for the best sample in the range. I needed to create this for the next item, which is - My C# Thread tool which runs managed threaded code for you. It creates no garbage so and uses the above optimizer on three different variables so as to find the best amount of threads, calls and inner loop sizes to use for your code. Because of that it can run managed code almost as fast as Burst/Jobs (whereas they use their own compiler and optimize code instead of using Mono). It can even beat Burst on small to medium workloads as long as the code inside doesn't contain some efficiency that Burst can natively fix. - Then of course there are other things an ECS needs like pathfinding, unit collision avoidance etc. For these I have both CPU and GPU solutions since CPU only really works up to about 10k entities at a decent framerate. So yeah, I don't recommend trying it; it's probably a total waste of time.
- ac2u 1y ago
  Have you seen where he’s using it though? His GBA Mario 64 port is one of the most impressive homebrew projects I’ve seen in years.
  - animal531 1y ago
    Oh yeah make no mistake, he's super talented!
gustavopezzi 1y ago
I share the same feeling. Programming can be an entertaining and joyful activity where enthusiasts don't really need to worry about creating something useful that will be shared with others. It's like cooking a beautiful and tasty gourmet recipe that serves only one.
- atan2 1y ago
  gustavo!!! your website was the first thing i thought of as i was reading this blog post. im a huge fan of your teaching style. thank you for everything you do! :-]
genericspammer 1y ago
As a toy project I can recommend re-creating the core functionality of Git. Its basic functionality beautifully simple. Checking out Linus’ first commit of Git and comparing it with my own solution was also very interesting (and humbling). If anyone is interested, here’s my toy Git implementation in Go https://github.com/emanueldonalds/shit https://github.com/emanueldonalds/shit
milgra 1y ago
Very nice collection of toy projects, I resonate with you, I also wrote a ton of toy projects in sabbaticals, check the better ones out here : https://milgra.com/ https://milgra.com/
- cellularmitosis 1y ago
  A one-sentence description would be a great addition to these projects. "SOV|APP|VIDEO|SOURCE" doesn't really invite a click.
CyberDildonics 1y ago
Everyone is caught up in focusing on LLMs instead of thinking about why smaller software is dramatically easier to write.
dev0p 1y ago
Very good article, but am I the only one who is seeing that this guy got Mario 64 working (somewhat) on a GameBoy Advance? That's insane.
dvektor 1y ago
Absolutely love this article, couldn't agree with this more.
sahil_sharma0 1y ago
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nesarkvechnep 1y ago
Everything is “a joy” these days, much less “could you elaborate”.
cellularmitosis 1y ago
> Orbital Mechanics Sim Here's a little toy I made. Try to keep the comet on-screen by clicking to spawn a planet: https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/gravity.html https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/gravity.html Written in C / SDL 1.2: https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/ https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/
percentcer 1y ago
These time-to-complete estimates seem reallyyyyyy aggressive to me. I dunno maybe I'm just the slowest programmer in the world.
- tessierashpool 1y ago
  yeah, it's a good post overall, but the humblebrag factor undermines it
mckravchyk 1y ago
If I ever have time for it, I would love to program a rotating LED display [0] Looks like magic. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvihYPq_mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvihYPq_mQ

820 points by bundie 1y ago

Ha, these "toys" are quite ambitious. Here are my joyful toys: https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog

Swizec 1y ago

Toy Software is a lot like working on your bike/car/boat/whatever. Working on your bike is fun. Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. I miss writing toy software. It’s fun. But inevitably I want to use said software and that’s where the trouble starts. You find all the bugs and none of the time to fix them.

kazinator 1y ago
The easy fix is to have two bikes. You can take the time to work on the offline bike, not to mention get needed parts.
unshavedyak 1y ago
I also have more "working software" interests than i have time and energy. Many of them have a ton of mundane boring details i've done a thousand times before. I'm actually a bit excited that i can work on what i want to work on. With that said it's a challenge and a chore on its own to curate what "AI" writes. So it's definitely not all roses. Disclaimer: I'm still early in the experimentation phase. We'll see if i hold these opinions in a few months.
jona777than 1y ago
I recently wrote my own invoicing application. I got wrapped up in the joy of adding the features I wanted. Many of these features come at a premium monthly fee for a big named product. I needed to get an invoice out in a timely fashion. As much as I wanted to use my app, I found certain kinks I needed to work out (with styling, adding addresses, etc.) -- This was where I realized what you have articulated. At some point, it becomes better to prioritize the "fun" in working on my bike, and the "usefulness" of the daily driver bike. In doing so, perhaps the fun/usefulness of each converges over time.
- egometry 1y ago
  Andy Schatz, the independent game creator of Monaco, said something at a GDC talk that really resonated with me along these lines I'm paraphrasing but - "Do the hard work that you need to do, but always give yourself an hour a day for the bullshit 'i don't have time for this but I want to do it' stuff. It'll keep you happy, which will keep you productive through the slog... and those little touches will stand out and make SOME people happy" For the unfamiliar (the man, not the talk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz
pjc50 1y ago
I used to self-host my email. I don't any more, for exactly this reason. And of course this applies to every other "just do it yourself!" enthusiast appeal. I actually want to delegate it to someone who does it full time.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Strange example, because self-hosted email has been pretty much setup-and-forget for me. I’ve been hosting my own email for several domains on a $5 VPS for over a decade and it’s largely just hummed along, without needing babysitting. Very rarely, some ISP’s spamblocker gets a little too squirrelly and I have a brief deliverability issue, but those are rare and easy to resolve.
- npodbielski 1y ago
  What kind of issues you have with it? I am running my own email server for.about 10 years and very rarely have to look at it.
  - reyqn 1y ago
    I heard a lot of people saying hosting your own email server was the best way to be considered as spam by every big email provider. I think it's a big issue, but I've never actually tried it.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    It was Exim on Debian; generally it would chug along fine for months and then incur some sort of regular sysadmin issue that nonetheless needs dealing with. Upgrades. Occasionally, breaking upgrades. Changes to anti-spam rules on other systems causing deliverability issues. ISP mandating IP migration. Earlier in the process it was an actual, physical rackmount server not a VPS, which incurred extra effort a couple of times to replace it. And the big one: inbound anti-spam. It's not that issues are frequent, it's just that there's no guarantee they won't be badly timed. There may come a point in your life where (a) you don't have a lot of free time and (b) you badly need a specific email. I still have the mail domain, I just pay an ISP to handle it for me.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful. How about working on your bike that other people also work on daily? That's work.
bee_rider 1y ago
I dunno. Working on a bike you want to use to ride to work could be stressful if it is your only bike, you need it to get to work, and your manager will be really mad if you don’t show up to work one day. If there was any slip available it wouldn’t be so bad. Actually, I really like this analogy because 1) We can’t really work on non-trivial fixes for our cars because they are too complex 2) We’ve totally structured our living situations around these over-complex beasts 3) Sometimes they do just break down at random, and it becomes a mini-crisis for everyone involved, which can’t really be resolved without missing a day of work to go to a professional 4) The bike is in exactly the same situation, except you can actually fix most bike problems yourself with a little kit And yet, it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car, instead of a bicycle. Some thoughts: Outside of, like, customer service, most places are throughput-oriented and it doesn’t even really matter all that much if somebody misses a day. If we really cared about “uptime” of employees, we’d all be living in bicycle range of our jobs, and able to fix our bikes. Maybe there’d be a bus route as well.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  As someone who's stuck to owning a single bike for over a decade (tho I will probably change this in the coming year) for both athletic rides and commuting, I'll say the "it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car" can sometimes make having a single bike worse. If my bike flats and I'm out of tubes and I have a busy day planned, I have to take it to a local bike shop but those generally close pretty early. If I miss the window to take it to an LBS then I'm SOL. With a car there's generally a developed enough ecosystem that I can get a roadside assistance type service to put a spare on the car until I can actually get my car into a shop. This is a good analogy for SaaS vs using a tinkerer tool. A tinkerer tool often can be customized exactly to your needs. I can work on my bike at 10 PM in my garage after dinner as long as I have the parts. But sometimes your tinkerer tool is going to leave you working all night or you'll be SOL. But SaaS is generally a full-time job for other folks. Sure you pay money, but there's fewer situations you're SOL. (Personally when my bike is inop and I need to head to work I use transit.)
  - patrickmay 1y ago
DustinBrett 1y ago
This is why I love building a personal website. It's like a live playground.
frollogaston 1y ago
I actually only like working on software that has a real use, at least to myself. The coolest is when I spin something up fast at work and people start relying on it. Same goes for my car, it's satisfying doing inexpensive fixes to keep it running. Wouldn't want some mid-2000s BMW project that's stuck in the garage half the time.
65 1y ago
I really just write software for myself only. The time difference (and fun level) between writing software for yourself and writing production quality software is huge. Feature doesn't work in Safari? Who cares, I don't use Safari anyway. No need to fix.
xmprt 1y ago
Perfect example for me is that I use beancount for tracking my finances. It broke one day because I tried upgrading some dependencies from v2 to v3. I tried messing around with the imports and some function names but it didn't help and after wasting 30m I decided to give up on the upgrade. 2 weeks later when I wasn't busy trying to get it to work, I gave it another shot. This time went so much more smoothly and now everything works (fingers crossed since I haven't actually tried out ALL the functionality).

asicsp 1y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284291 (117 points | 8 days ago | 28 comments) Seems like the link changed, and thus not caught by the dupe detector.

zesterer 1y ago
Apologies, I overhauled the entire website (backend and all). I wrote a post about it, if you're curious.

rubicon33 1y ago

> In 2025, the beauty and craft of writing software is being eroded. AI is threatening to replace us (or, at least, the most joyful aspects of our craft) and software development is being increasingly commodified, measured, packaged, and industrialised. Software development needs more simple joy, and I’ve found that creating toy programs is a great way to remember why I started working with computers again. Sad but true. I especially feel that comment about losing the most “joyful” part.

danielbln 1y ago
I have more joy than ever working on toy software while using LLMs. My joy comes from building things, thinking architecture, components, creative solutions that create something new and exciting. Hand-setting lines of code is NOT what brings me joy personally, it's a means to an end. Dancing with agentic LLMs is so much fun to me. I can however understand that if the code part is what brings you joy, then we're probably not moving in a direction that pleases you. For those of us who like to build, first and foremost, it's heaven.
- tines 1y ago
  I don't think the hand-setting lines of code is really the part that brings these people joy, the joy is in understanding. LLM-like tools do not create understanding in the user, who is farming out the understanding in order to get results quickly. I understand the draw and usefulness of this, but just clarifying, it's not the typing that matters, it's what is going on (or not going on) in one's mind.
klabb3 1y ago
> AI is threatening to replace us (or, at least, the most joyful aspects of our craft) I don’t like this either but every time I use LLMs it feels like we’re talking about completely different things. It moves waaay to fast and makes bad decisions at every turn, if I accepted them all it would be complexity deadlock within a week tops. Pooping out boilerplate sure but then you’re generally holding it wrong anyway (or there’s an opportunity to automate things). Plus even if you don’t have the time to automate it, sure, but then are you enjoying the act of shitting out your own boilerplate? Out of the things I consider fun the LLM is at best a good rubber duck. It needs constant hand-holding, sometimes polluting the context window (and physical space) with a barrage of poorly written code. Code is bad, we’re trying to minimize it. No? At least that’s how I think: what’s the minimum* amount of code that can solve this problem? *: minimum in a brain complexity sense, not char count. They correlate strongly though

thomascountz 1y ago

GameBoy Advance game (difficulty = 3/10, time = 2 weeks) Wow! Physics engine (difficulty = 5/10, time = 1 week) What?? Threaded Virtual Machine (difficulty = 6/10, time = 1 week) I— POSIX shell (difficulty = 4/10, time = 3-5 days) Ok... I can't believe this person :D But regardless of the time estimates, I appreciate the idea!

Jtsummers 1y ago
I was going to make a similar comment. This list is fine, but the times are all over the place. If they removed those estimates it'd be a much better list. If a hash map takes 3-5 days for someone, they aren't making a threaded VM in 7 days.
tuveson 1y ago
I have to assume the author listed these times based on how long it would take for someone to follow along with the blogs that they linked to, which demonstrate stripped down simple versions of these things. Like the POSIX shell example just implements a few basic things, but leaves out a lot (and says so).
- zesterer 1y ago
  This is the point, yes! Toy software is not production-worthy. It might not even be sufficient for your own personal use. It's about building proof of concepts and rapidly scouting out the terrain of a field you don't know much about, and getting a souvenir to remember the experience with. Oftentimes I find that I enjoy one of the projects so much that I take it further than 'toy', but that usually ups the time estimate by an order of magnitude.
simonw 1y ago
This person is a game developer who works on an open source voxel RPG https://github.com/veloren/veloren https://github.com/veloren/veloren - take their estimates with that in mind!

rybosome 1y ago

This is quite an impressive list, and many of the things ranking low in difficulty for the author would have been quite high for me. It's definitely inspiring, makes me want to dust off a toy of my own. That said, I feel the conclusion on learning with LLMs deserves some more nuance. It really depends on how you use them. This is a terrible prompt for learning: > Implement this solution for me This is an AMAZING prompt for learning: > Please give me an overview of ELF. Focus on the highest level abstractions, more of the 'why' than the 'how' Certainly one can argue that it takes something away, in that you did not have to conduct the research yourself whenever a question occurred. However, if you are engaging in honest intellectual work (i.e. really thinking), then having a Socratic teacher always ready to discuss your questions is a profound accelerant to the learning process.

zesterer 1y ago
I think what you've identified is the "certain kinds of learning" I mention in the post. If I want to learn about the structure of ELF binaries, I don't figure it out from first principles. I can't: the decisions that went into its design where highly specific to its history and the sensibilities of its creators, and in a modern context a lot of those decisions are near enough random. These are the sorts of things you should use specs, docs, Google, and maybe an LLM for. What I'm talking about is, I guess, 'constructive' learning. I might not be able to build my own ELF parser through guesswork, but I probably can write a binary format of my own and a simple OS kernel to read it, given enough time. It probably won't look much like ELF, but the process of discovery that'll happen will teach me about why ELF came to be and what problems is solving, and also about the wider design space that sits around it. My suggestion is that you should not use an LLM's help for the latter. I like to think of it this way: if you bolted me to a chair in a room with nothing but a laptop, a text editor, and a compiler, what might I be able to create if you left me for 10 years? What couldn't I create because I wouldn't have sufficient implementation-specific information?

roughly 1y ago

One of the best things that I’ve done for myself, career-wise, came during a 6-month sabbatical between jobs. I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to do, but I kept finding myself stymied by scope creep - when you don’t have any constraints, it’s hard to decide how big a project should be, and the projects would grow to these massive unfinishable beasts. I decided to constrain myself to one week per project - whatever I could get done in a week was what I’d do for this project. The experience of going from zero to something useable in either a new language or a new framework or a new field in a week was enormously confidence-building - learning that I was actually pretty good at this whole programming thing and breaking through a bunch of walls I’d run into previously in my professional career gave me an incredible amount of trust in myself to be able to take on new challenges that really helped me when I was looking for a new job. At the same time, it reminded me what I loved about programming - in a week, I was able to build something that solved a problem I had or that someone I knew had, and I got to do so in a creative and intellectually challenging fashion. If ever you find yourself in a position to take a couple months off between jobs, skip the leetcoding or whatever else and just build some toy projects - you’ll be amazed how much you already know.

jonator 1y ago
I've done the same, but with AI generating a lot of the boilerplate, and helping generate automated tests, has accelerated this process considerably.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
I would just add that gen AI can actually be a fantastic aid when you're building some toy projects just for yourself. I am primarily a backend engineer, though I am capable on the front end, just not particularly fast. I am especially slow at the voodoo that is CSS. In the past, I would have been turned off from doing some end-to-end personal projects because I know I would have been bogged down just battling CSS for hours and hours (it's particularly problematic that I'm slow at CSS but also a stickler for how I want things to look). With AI tools I can literally just say "make it pretty". It gets me about 85% of the way there, but importantly it gets me to the point where it puts in all the styling framework and then I just have to fix bugs/edit/tweak it, which goes very quickly. So now I've found myself much more likely to build personal projects because I know I can get past things that in the past felt a bit like quicksand to me.

ravenstine 1y ago

One thing I've learned about building toy software projects or even just small personal software (stuff that's actually useful) is to avoid implementing flexible configuration engines. I used to fall into this trap where I thought I should make my software to be configuration-centric so that it would be usable for others in case I decided to make my code FOSS. The problem with that is making a configuration engine is a lot less efficient than just writing the code to do the damn thing. I've almost never shared any code outside of small libraries that were very low in complexity, and I wasted a lot of time writing code for other hypothetical people when I should have just been writing it for myself.

dockercompost 1y ago
A rite of passage! :D
pinoy420 1y ago
[dead]
bob1029 1y ago
> The problem with that is making a configuration engine is a lot less efficient than just writing the code to do the damn thing. http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complex... It took me a solid decade to accept these lessons. I cannot build a product that even remotely competes with things like Visual Studio and .NET tooling. How many hours would it take a solo developer to recreate a debugger experience that anyone else could be bothered to look at for more than 5 seconds? The hardest part of building something configurable is the UI/UX. The moment you step outside of the host language, your tooling support goes to zero. Sure, you can pick other popular languages as the language of configuration (SQL, python, Lua, etc.) and piggyback off those ecosystems. But, you still have to build a way for a "non programmer" to visit all of the patchwork sites of "configuration" in a coherent way. Telling the business people to go edit a folder full of .py and .sql files will probably not be received well. Wrapping all of this with a fancy web interface doesn't make the problem less severe either (it makes it substantially worse). If you have a way to build/deploy your product in <60 seconds from source, worrying about elaborate configuration and customization architecture seems extremely idiotic to me now. The best path I've found is something approximating a common library and a per-customer executable that consumes it and implements the expected contracts. Each customer's project lives in a subfolder on the same monorepo. The power of the hierarchical filesystem is tragically understated throughout our industry.

declan_roberts 1y ago

This is one thing I don't get about the LLM people. For most of us who are professionals, writing software is not very hard, and it is in fact fun! I don't need to let a computer write my software. I already know how, and I enjoy it. I need the computer to do the hard part (gathering requirements, speaking with stakeholders, etc). Software is a joy.

marginalia_nu 1y ago
There are several sources of joy in programming. Some lean more toward the process and exploration of the problem domain, others more toward the outcome and impact. I had a shift of perspective at some point where I realized that software wasn't just fun to create, but you can solve problems with it, including your own, which is incredibly rewarding and kinda feels like wizardry. Ultimately I find both to be enjoyable, though in terms of career and life outcomes, focusing on solving real problems and producing tangible outcomes has had more of an impact than noodling with neat implementations that nobody but me cared about. Turns out if you solve your own problems (or just publicly work toward solving them), there are often other people who also struggle with the sam problems, who may throw money your way ;-)

heroku 1y ago

Reinventing existing software has 0 merit. If you cannot be creative enough to invent new things, you shouldn't bother working.

simonw 1y ago
That's rubbish. Reinventing existing software as a learning exercise has plenty of merit.
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  No it doesnt. Build new things or dont waste your time. Learning exercise lol.
  - imchillyb 1y ago
    I don't believe you understand the word iteration, why that word exists, or the benefits it provides to society in general.
amunozo 1y ago
How are you supposed to learn to invent new things if you don't know how existing things work?
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  There's ZERO room for innovation in the projects suggested. Wanna do some creative thinking? Read some books, learn how normal people think. Explore latest datasets. That's where the meat is. 98% of what you read online has been written by super uncreative(boring) people. They have no imagination whatsoever, IQ is well statistically speaking not too flattering. Internet is ran by the bottom. It's slop by the bottom, for the bottom. So you need to hang out with creative people. Tech people write the most boring blog posts because it's aimed at getting hired. Nothing of substance is shared. That's why gwern stands out like a sore thumb. The majority of human beings are incapable of creative thought.

didip 1y ago

Big time! Almost all of my interesting knowledge came from toy projects I made to solve my own problems (or zero problem solved but it was fun so I did it anyway). For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and AWS EC2. And then as the "customer app", I run CockroachDB, rqlite, and tiDB on it (one at a time, I don't want to burn money for this). It was janky, zero SLA, I likely mis-tuned all the databases, and cost a bit of money :(. But it totally worked, all the db nodes can discover each other. I was satisfied and that's enough. Another example would be writing my own Raft-backed database, similar to the ToyDB Rust project posted here. Is the DB useful? No. But it is so much fun and I learned a lot. My AWS S3 bucket and private Git repo are a graveyard full of toy projects. My own Dropbox clone, Pinterest clone, Delicious clone, subset of Google Maps clone, etc. etc. are all RIP in there.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud Can I ask what you had running on that cluster?
- didip 1y ago
  As of right now? Nothing important. If I want to use it day-to-day, then I have to care about SLA, then I have to be the sysadmin of that thing. Not exactly fun :) What's interesting is that the TailScale network allows the local daemon be exposed on the internet with small settings change. Pretty revolutionary for personal/home IoT projects.
otoolep 1y ago
rqlite[1] creator here, happy to answer any questions. If you're interested in writing Raft-backed databases you might be interested in my talk at GopherCon 2023. It walks through doing exactly that, step by step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbxQ1Epi5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbxQ1Epi5w [1] https://rqlite.io https://rqlite.io

falcor84 1y ago

I love that attitude! This is essentially my preferred answer to "what would people do in a post-AGI world when they don't need to work any more".

oconnor663 1y ago

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate. I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our advice for getting help from AI is different from our advice for getting help from other humans. It would be kind of odd, wouldn't it, to put a paragraph at the bottom of a blog post that said "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." I think there are two clear reasons that feels odd: 1) expert friends can actually answer your questions and get you personally unstuck, which is huge, and 2) expert friends usually understand why you're doing what you're doing and that they're supposed to help do it yourself instead of just doing it for you. One thing I bet few people have tried (because I haven't tried it myself) is actually asking an LLM to guide you like an expert friend would, instead of just spitting out code to solve your problem. Maybe they're bad at that, I wouldn't be surprised. But if so, I bet in a year or two they'll be amazing at it. It might be good to build the habit of clarifying what sort of help you need, instead of assuming an LLM will give you the wrong kind of help?

leeoniya 1y ago
> "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." AI is not an expert programmer [today]. and it doesnt take an expert programmer to arrive at that conclusion.
- superb_dev 1y ago
  I also bet your expert programmer friend is give you pointers and not writing the whole thing for you
- hbn 1y ago
  Call it whatever you want, it helps me get unstuck when my dependencies aren't getting along, or when I need to figure out what's wrong with my usage of an API I'm not familiar with, or why my build won't startup based on the code and the vague error message, etc. I don't care if it's a human or a robot telling me, I just want to get unstuck and I've been getting unstuck more since the advent of LLMs than in the rest of my programming career. Digging through bad documentation and Googling for old form posts of similar-but-not-quite-the-same-issues was always the worst part of programming to me, and I'm glad there's a tool that finally solved that problem.

vinceguidry 1y ago

I'm writing a shell right now in ruby after seeing a few other folks doing so and looking at the current state of shell development and not finding anything I really liked. It is indeed, a lot of fun. Using Vidar's really quite nice text editor to do so is equally pleasurable. https://github.com/vidarh/re https://github.com/vidarh/re Got a few PRs for you when you get to this, friend.

hu3 1y ago

I've written a ton of throwaway toy applications for personal use. The tip I can share is: publish them on GitHub. You'll find out some of them are useful to a lot of people. I have multiple toy repos with 20+ stars and one with 200+ stars. Just put one screenshot and simple instructions to run on README.md, no need to write a manual. As simple as `npm install && npm run start` is enough instruction for most. The screenshot is important tho.

simonw 1y ago
This is also a great way to stand out among other candidates in the resume-review stage of a hiring process. The number one question I have as a hiring manager is always "can this person actually write code". A GitHub profile with 2-3 projects with multiple commits to each one answers that question really well. I won't filter out people who don't have that - lots of great engineers have never published code before - but the people who do have that are much more likely to get picked for the phone screen.
- thrtythreeforty 1y ago
  The converse is actually a negative signal for me. If you list a GitHub profile on your resume, but that GitHub profile is a ghost town consisting exclusively of "test repo please ignore" and "freshman-year assignments I was required to fork from professor's repo," that tells me you don't have an above-average understanding of why you add something to your resume. If you don't have an impressive GitHub profile, that's fine. To your point - the absence of it is not a penalty, and the presence of a good one is a very positive signal. But the presence of one that turns out to be a dud is a negative.
  - simonw 1y ago
    It partly depends on the level I'm hiring for. A junior candidate with a GitHub profile full of obvious tutorial projects still helps me skip putting them through FizzBuzz. A senior candidate with a ghost town could reflect poorly on them.
  - 1y ago

notepad0x90 1y ago

I have a couple of projects like this and I'm not sure if they'll ever see the light of day. I enjoy writing code, simple as that. Only a small part of my day job is coding, but honestly, it's more like a hobby than anything. The whole thing with getting people to like your work, using it for clout or padding your resume has an appeal to it that I won't dismiss, but all that takes the fun out of it. I just don't have much else I actually enjoy in life, so ruining it with peer-pressure, chasing clout, impressing people, worrying about career prospects is a buzz-kill. I used to think that if I am passionate about something like this and I get really good at it, maybe it will help my career and prospects but the real world doesn't work that way. it sucks the joy, fun and passion out of you if you let it. All that to say it is perfectly fine to like coding for the sake of enjoying it and nothing more. Others play a sport (or watch it), work on arts & crafts, or raise chickens or whatever, I code. I am not particularly skilled or great at coding either, I just enjoy it, and that's it. If you have fun coding, be protective of your joy! even if you don't take it to the extreme like I do. that's my only point.

ethinton 1y ago
I love this take, and I’m reminded of the important idea that while we all are encouraged to be productive, our own joy is also an important thing for us to produce.

kgwxd 1y ago

I've abandoned tons of toy code but I have 1 thing I wrote in a weekend for myself that I've been mostly blindly using ever since. I just realized while typing this that it's been 8 years. It's a Firefox add-on that I only published to the "store" because running a local-only add-on is a PITA. It takes regex(s), searches attribute values and/or inner text, and applies a given CSS rule to elements that match. The UI is awful (regex escaped to be inside a json string escaped to be inside a textarea all parsed by javascript) but I know how to use it. It can probably be used for many things, but I just use it to set visibility: none on elements that link to sites I don't ever want to see (facebook, twitter, linkedin, popular pay/register-walled sites, etc). For example, my HN and reddit views just have blank lines where links any of those sites would normally be. For the most part, I add a site once, and forget they ever existed (except when their CEOs do awful things).

dwh452 1y ago

What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Here's a few disorganized thoughts in good faith 1. Because half her friends and family are on iOS, and that means fighting the App Store. (This is a social problem essentially, in fighting Apple) 2. Because networking is hard. How would you have shared recipes with a computer in the C64 days? Email? BBS? (There are partial technical solutions to this, but they would require people to run something like friend-to-friend overlay networks) 3. Because most stuff happens in web browsers and that means pay-to-play, or vendor lock-in, or using AWS free tier and being a programmer. (Ass, grass, or cash, nobody hosts for free. Friend-to-friend networks may also help with this) 4. Because a recipe manager with sharing is best implemented as just emailing your recipes to your friends and storing them as txt files locally. Anything more complicated is beyond the scope of a Visual Basic-style drag-and-drop WYSIWYG anyway 5. When was drag-and-drop enough? The widgets need code behind them to save and open files, right? 6. You might be kinda onto something, and the longer I write async code I more I think the programming world is ready for another big pruning. Like when structured programming said "No goto, no long jumps, if-else and exceptions is all you need", we might be ready for "A single control thread which never blocks and never awaits, and delegates to worker tasks, is all you need until you are building some C100k shit"
jlarocco 1y ago
> Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family? Because there's no money in it.
hathawsh 1y ago
I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would be making deployment extremely simple, reliable, and safe.

dakiol 1y ago

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official documentation of each db, forums, blog posts, stackoverflow entries, etc. It was time consuming on the searching side. The time it took to read all the sources was fine for me (it's learning time, so that's always welcomed). Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". So, I get a quick overview of what to keep an eye on, and the references are there to avoid relying on hallucination. It's true that sometimes I go ahead and say "give me a data schema for storing photos metadata in postgres. I wanna keep X in a different table, though" (or something like that). But I do that because I know very well what the output should look like (I just don't wanna spend time typing it, and sometimes I forget the actual type that I should use (int vs integer?)).

Viliam1234 1y ago
> Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will only be about proper framing and emphasis, etc.
- pietmichal 1y ago
  This was already a problem in a world without LLMs. Reputation is the only human mechanism that mitigates this.
  - SpaceNoodled 1y ago
    It's seriously exacerbated by smug LLMs.

cdelsolar 1y ago

I love the article but disagree with the final point. It wasn't until LLMs came out that my toy projects have all been greatly upgraded with features and functionality. I simply didn't have time to do so before.

zesterer 1y ago
The point is not the final product, the point is the process.

coolThingsFirst 1y ago

Waste of time, you wont impress anyone because there are no more software jobs left. Go to gym.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Who am I impressing at the gym? The weights have already been lifted
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  So you don't look like sh* that's more impressive than cranking out code that absolutely no one cares about. Especially things that have been done 100s of times.
  - z0r 1y ago
    Please work out. But also please write software if you want to improve your skills.
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  udk what you're missing out if you aren't in the gym twice a week.

munificent 1y ago

An anecdote about how a toy project _really_ helped me out: I work on Dart professionally. I've also been tinkering on a toy programming language that may never see the light of day. My toy language has gone through several incarnations but a while back I was working on adding algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, and exhaustiveness checking to it. The canonical algorithm for exhaustiveness checking is this paper by Luc Maranget: http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/warn/warn.pdf http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/warn/warn.pdf When I first started dabbling in programming languages over a decade ago, I tried to understand that paper for weeks and just could not wrap my head around it. I don't have much of a formal CS background and that paper was impenetrable to me. So here I am tinkering on my toy programming language and I run into again. I give it another try and laboriously implement it in my interpreter, basically doing a straight translation. I don't understand the code, but it seems to sort of work. So then I start refactoring it a tiny bit at a time into a style that fits the way I think about code. Eventually the algorithm sort of folds into itself and before I know it, I finally understand how it works. The end result was only a page or so of code, but my toy language had real exhaustiveness checking work. Meanwhile, at work, I am working on adding pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking to Dart [1]. Exhaustiveness checking here is a much harder proposition because Dart has subtyping, unlike my toy language and the ML languages that Maranget's paper works on. I'd been hacking away at an exhaustiveness algorithm for Dart based on a couple of papers about Scala's approach but they were sort of approximative and inelegant (in my opinion, maybe they are a great fit for Scala). But once I understood Maranget's algorithm from implementing it in my toy project, it finally clicked for me how it could be adapted to work with subtyping in a sound, coherent way. I wrote it up as quickly as I could and (with a lot of additional help from a teammate to handle generics), that became the algorithm we shipped: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0/patterns/exhaustiveness.md https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0... It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't coincidentally been working on a toy pattern matching implementation at home. [1]: https://dart.dev/language/patterns https://dart.dev/language/patterns

zesterer 1y ago
I love this, this is exactly the sort of thing I've experienced too: building the toy project gave me an on-ramp to something similar but much more complicated in the future.

aldousd666 1y ago

I've done a lot of these kinds of projects. I got really sucked into a rabbit hole with the parser/interpreter/compiler that I was stuck (happily) in "I need to understand this so I will build one" mode. I eventually built a database server and query language for it. (for a business) This was in 2009, but I highly identify with his method of learning by doing for fun!

jekwoooooe 1y ago

I agree. It’s fun to just write code to solve problems or even for fun. I love go (it’s the best all around language and it’s not even close) so for fun I wrote a game engine and a small game that I might try to turn into an actual game. It’s good to keep fresh. I’ve also tried to do llm free days

ppqqrr 1y ago

Problem/Truth is that writing toy software is not profitable - that's not to say one must always work on profitable things; what i mean is that it's being kept unprofitable, because in a hyper-saturated monopolized attention economy, every piece of "toy" software that isn't a video game or a plugin to some proprietary app ecosystem is essentially an act of subversion, an attempted "theft" or piracy of what the Company considers its rightful property: the sum of all disposable human attention.

zesterer 1y ago
That sounds as good a reason as any to become a pirate, frankly

linsomniac 1y ago

>Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. [...] But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. I agree. However: Your best bet is likely to build it by hand and then see if you can get an LLM to build it. It is looking like we are living in a world where an important tool to have in your toolbox is going to be the skills and experience of working with the LLM/AI tooling. There are skills, knowledge, tools, tips and techniques that you need to develop to effectively use these tools, just like the honing you get from writing the code. Over just the last half hour I did a brain dump of "hot tips" to a friend of mine who is just starting to use Claude Code to kick-start him. The LLMs are REALLY good at writing small toy programs, and at the end of the day it's great to have little tools that you'll use every day.

_benton 1y ago

Possibly tangential, but I've really been enjoying writing software with very minimal tech stacks with no dependencies (or very few). Go works well for this, but really any language that lets you create a file and just start writing straightforward code is sufficient. As soon as I need to use some CLI to scaffold out a project with tens or hundreds of files, or pull in a ton of dependencies, I kind of check out. It's fine when you have a team and a big serious project, but in my free time I really just enjoy having a couple files of straightforward code and that's it.

josefresco 1y ago

Vibe coding via Claude has re-ignited my passion for fun, side programming projects. After a few false starts, I figured out the tooling, processes and in just a few weeks I've built several apps and I'm having new ideas consistently: -Family calendar/weather dashboard -Bluesky reader that allows you to hide posts you've "seen" -Work PM dashboard to make time tracking more gamified and dare I say... fun? -Chrome Reddit extension that hides posts after viewing for X seconds -A WordPress plugin to replace a plugin no longer maintained What I love and had to get used to was looking/using these apps and being happy with them being only 90%. Initially I had Claude make many UI enhancements but I learned to just let most stuff go and focus on the function and building new stuff, not refinement.

snarf21 1y ago
I struggle with Claude fixing a bug and not giving me the updated output. Like explicitly having to ask it for the fix 6 times while it insists the update is in the output. Did you ever have that happen?
- rokkamokka 1y ago
  Personally, I just fix the bug myself. It's way less aggravating for me than prompting back and forth many times.
- dpkirchner 1y ago
  I haven't seen this, unless I don't understand exactly what you mean. I can ask it questions about my code and get answers most easily if I explicitly say "don't write any code".
- josefresco 1y ago
  I read some good advice: give Claude 3 bites at the apple and then burn the session and start over. I find if Claude doesn't get it ready the first or second time the chances of a successful outcome drop considerably. Also "Projects" was a nice low setup way of giving context.
  - 1y ago

AutistiCoder 1y ago

I know writing "toy" software has exposed me to new tools I might not have otherwise even known about. I can't afford much n the way of software, so I've been trying to learn to make do with FOSS.

bitwize 1y ago

Ever since Nintendo let the mask slip and got up to their old evil bullshit with the Switch 2 launch, I decided to dust off the solution my teenage self came up with: I'll just play the video games I write. Even if they're small and amateurish, they're worlds and experiences crafted personally for me. And I don't have to pay a cent for them, let alone put up with "key carts", DRM bullshit, or we-can-remotely-brick-your-console bullshit. I'm sure I'll keep buying commercial games from companies with reasonable terms (GOG, maybe?). But writing my own is great fun. It'd be nice if someone else enjoys them, but they're mainly for my own enjoyment. Oh, and I "vibe code" the old fashioned way: with a REPL and some chill tunes.

tanjtanjtanj 1y ago
What sort of evil bullshit did Nintendo get up to with the Switch 2 launch? I don't follow gaming news.
- bitwize 1y ago
  1) High prices for the console and games, which may be partially explained by inflation, but still, shit's steep. We're back to the early 90s days of scouring pawnshops for deals and carefully considering which few games we really want to buy. Plus, $10 for a sales demo (Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour). 2) Console must be registered online before becoming playable in handheld mode. 3) Nintendo recently released a terms of service update in which they reserve the right to disable your console if they catch you violating acceptable use. Switch 2s found using piracy carts have not yet been bricked this way, only locked out of internet play (like original Switches were), but still... 4) Some Switch 2 games will not get a physical release, only a cartridge which provides an "activation key" for a digitally downloaded game. Why even bother with this bullshit, I don't know, because it's all of the downsides of physical media and all of the downsides of digital downloads, with none of the upsides of either. On a console.

eliasdorneles 1y ago

I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours per day. I feel most of those projects would take significant time researching and learning about the subjects, before even starting to code. Example: recently I replaced my Pelican blog by my own hacky static site generator written in Odin, working 2-3h per day, it took me 2 weeks -- and this is a simpler project than many on that list.

sowbug 1y ago
Your project is vastly more specified than a toy project, because it has a real customer (you) who will expect it to work after it ships. That expectation is what separates toys from real tools. I bet you could write a word processor in an hour. It might only add or delete one character at a time (no selections). It might persist only to a hard-coded "output.txt" filename. You might have to kill the process because there's no quit operation. But that would suffice for a toy word processor.
- eliasdorneles 1y ago
  Fair point, my example was indeed "shipped to production" and may not compare a throwaway static generator toy project. I still think those estimates are off, because I think many of those projects would need significant research and learning time, possibly more than actually coding -- not to mention time spent troubleshooting when something goes wrong.
orthoxerox 1y ago
I think that if you interpret "X days" as "24*X hours" this list becomes much more realistic.
- sc68cal 1y ago
  Who does that though

alanbernstein 1y ago

I agree with the sentiment in theory, but the time pressures of adult life make this difficult. > What I cannot create, I do not understand I suspect Mr Feynman would have phrased this a bit differently if he had first-hand experience with the modern front-end technology treadmill.

bowsamic 1y ago

If you're allowed! Apple says no

purplesyringa 1y ago

I'm surprised by the number of bad takes on LLMs in this thread. LLMs spoon-feed you with information about how things are implemented. You are not supposed to know how everything works when you start these projects. You're supposed to try your best, inevitably fail, then research the topic and understand where you went wrong, then adjust your approach. If you know how everything works and just follow the tutorial, you won't know what makes other methods fail, and by proxy what makes the one you chose work. Write a language parser with a regex. Find out that it can't parse recursive statements. You've now learnt that regex can only parse a specific subset of syntaxes. Try to workaround this by pattern-matching the most nested statement first. Find out that it blows up performance. You now know more about time complexity and know what to watch out for when you write a real parser. Write a non-optimizing compiler from scratch. Find out that you can't make do with unsound optimizations because you can't keep track of what optimizations are applied where. Find out that implementing sound optimizations is hard because you need to track use-def chains. Then you'll understand why SSA is used. Find out that code motion is a mess. Learn about sea of nodes. Merge every optimization pass into one because you're unable to order passes right. Learn how e-graphs solve this. Write a layout engine. Get stuck on being unable to define what a "width" is. Workaround this with min/max/natural widths, introduce binary search, etc. Learn how this stuff works in practice (this is something I haven't personally done yet). They say we learn from mistakes. Please don't let the smart (or "smart", depending on how you look at it) machine stop you from making them. It's not a teacher and it doesn't know how to educate.

foretop_yardarm 1y ago
A lot of people say if you don’t use LLMs then you will fall behind. I’m starting to think that not using them will be a significant advantage in the long run.
- tines 1y ago
  IMO we are going to see a large class of people who have cognitive deficits brought on by AI tool usage. I've been wondering lately about how to distinguish between tools that enhance your cognitive ability, and tools that degrade it. Jobs called a computer a "bicycle for the mind," and it seems like LLMs are an easy-chair for the mind. I'm not sure a priori how to distinguish between the two classes of tools though. Maybe there is no other tool like an LLM.

b0a04gl 1y ago

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tayo42 1y ago

I'm always mixed on this. In the moment it can be fun. In the end when it inevitably feels useless, idk it feels bad. Like I spent a ton of time on something and get some knowledge out of it. It doesn't make my job better and I guess doesn't improve my situation much. My rust sub-directory feels like a digital closet of rpis collecting dust. The things I find fun writing and learning about and the tools I use to do it are so disconnected from anything i do professionally.

diegomacario 1y ago

I did this for years to learn computer graphics. I spent so many weekends and evenings building weird things that never made me a single dollar, but all the knowledge I gained eventually led to the job of my dreams. Here are some of the weird things I built: - Tiny ray-tracer: https://github.com/diegomacario/Super-Sunshine https://github.com/diegomacario/Super-Sunshine - 2D rigid-body simulator: https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics - Character animation system: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Experiments/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Experiments/public/... - Animation curve visualizer: https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Magic/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Animation-Magic/public/index.... - Motion capture playback in the web: https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index.html https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index... That's a mountain of code that served one purpose: to gain knowledge.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

I don't really get a lot of joy out of building copies of things other people have done better than me before. Almost by definition, no list of cool toy projects is going to appeal to me for that reason. I might like the techniques or algorithms employed within them, but frankly if I'm after that kind of knowledge I just find Leetcode and traditional studying to be both higher value and more fun. But I do like writing programs in some strange new, non-CS domain where very little software to address my very particular needs already exists. Most of the software I've written in the last few years has been of this kind, for the purposes of learning Finnish. It is amazing what a few shell scripts, fzf wrappers, and well-timed calls to an LLM can do for accelerating one's own learning process.

xixixao 1y ago

Overengineering is a joy. Using LLMs is a joy. Building something novel, bespoke, something you wouldn’t do when ruthlessly prioritizing for profit.

heikkilevanto 1y ago

The first example in the article, a regex engine, clicked for me. I had read the book on beautiful code #, and the first short story was about a regex thing by none other than Dennis Ritchie. As Fate would have it, my job required me to make a tool for web scraping. Inspired by that book I created a pattern matching language for dom trees. And a click and point tool to create those patterns. At the best time or company had a full time person maintaining maybe 10k patterns to scrape days from library catalogs... It was not a toy project, but it did feel like, even if I got paid to do it. # Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"

cellularmitosis 1y ago
Took a minute to track that down (Oran is spelled Oram?) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/9780596510046/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/97805965...

Lerc 1y ago

I added up a score for myself from that list giving me one point for something that more-or-less matches an item from this list and a half point for something vaguely similar. I got 15.5 The compiler, chess engine, and text-editor have been targets for years but I haven't quite gotten around to doing them. I like the idea of the bitwise challenge. I had been thinking that another challenge that I'd like to see (and have a go at) might be a plotPixel Challenge. Make a game that does all rendering with PlotPixel(x : int, y : int, color:??? ) NextFrame(offScreen:boolean = true, clearNow:boolean =true, clearColor:??? =0) Unsure on byte for 256 indexed color or 32 bit for setting 24 bit color from ARGB as r= rA+R, g=gA+G, b=b*A+B. It would be easy enough to test if a game obeyed the rules because a full video capture of the game should be possible by intercepting just those functions. Perhaps a (generous) source code size constraint to stop people going too crazy. (maybe 64/128/256k source-code, zipped). Not for code golfing as much as to avoid people trying to squeeze Crysis though a straw.

nektro 1y ago

love the spirit of the article, the time frames listed are quite unrealistic however

glouwbug 1y ago
I’d triple the estimates, really. For example a game boy emulator is not trivial; there are far too many edge cases with a zilog. Chip8 would better fit for that time frame.

djmips 1y ago

Consider it like exercise. Pro atheletes train and exercise. Pro software developers should train and exercise their craft.

ericyd 1y ago

I really like the idea purposed here but none of these projects are even remotely interesting to me. It's moments like this when I start to question whether or not I'm losing my love of programming.

osmsucks 1y ago
Perhaps. I scanned the list and most of them sound like interesting projects that I would like to tackle at some point (or that I have tackled in the past for "fun"). Honestly, I think I was in your same position until recently, then I had some time off work thanks to the newborn and decided to start a "simple" coding project. Since it was purely for fun and to challenge myself, I decided to try and avoid bringing in any dependencies and wrote everything from scratch. This made it much larger and more complex than I had initially anticipated, but despite that (or, maybe, because of that?) I longed for those few hours when I could tinker on my project. Coding suddenly became fun again. Maybe you're just a bit burnt out?
- ericyd 1y ago
  Definitely a possibility

zazazx 1y ago

Software is like baseball. Never stop practicing.

scarface_74 1y ago

It seems to be an unpopular opinion here. But the last thing I want to do when I get off of work is touch a computer. I haven’t desired to be a hobbyist developer nor have I written a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since the day I walked across the stage with my CS degree in 1996. I was hobbyist for 10 years before then. Life is too short to spend in front of computer. Writing software funds my joy.

andreygrehov 1y ago

My kids (7-10yo) are currently learning programming. I’m debating if I should show them the LLM. Leaning towards no :)

mathewshen 1y ago

Agree and that's why I create https://github.com/ai-glimpse https://github.com/ai-glimpse

admiralrohan 1y ago

Good list of projects. I have to disagree on the point on usage of LLMs. These projects are going to be sideprojects and with busy schedule it might get tough to find motivation. Using LLMs for some of the parts can give the momentum required to continue. We can also learn from studying the output generated by LLMs.

animal531 1y ago

>An ECS framework, 1-2 weeks That gave me a good chuckle. Yeah look, you can change your data layout to be in more of an ECS format, make some optimizations and call it a day; but in reality you're still going to be pretty far from the real thing. I can say this because I've been working on one for some months now, of course I'm going for a production build and also to turn it into a Unity asset that's worthy of being sold, so it's going to require a lot more effort. The goal of mine is to ensure that its extremely simple to use (which Units DOTS totally fails at) while still being as efficient as possible. Some notable things I've had to do for this project: - I have a tool releasing on the Unity asset store (currently being vetted) that performs optimization for you, e.g. you give it a variable such as an int, a range of let's say 1..1024; then it'll automatically time your code while searching for the best sample in the range. I needed to create this for the next item, which is - My C# Thread tool which runs managed threaded code for you. It creates no garbage so and uses the above optimizer on three different variables so as to find the best amount of threads, calls and inner loop sizes to use for your code. Because of that it can run managed code almost as fast as Burst/Jobs (whereas they use their own compiler and optimize code instead of using Mono). It can even beat Burst on small to medium workloads as long as the code inside doesn't contain some efficiency that Burst can natively fix. - Then of course there are other things an ECS needs like pathfinding, unit collision avoidance etc. For these I have both CPU and GPU solutions since CPU only really works up to about 10k entities at a decent framerate. So yeah, I don't recommend trying it; it's probably a total waste of time.

ac2u 1y ago
Have you seen where he’s using it though? His GBA Mario 64 port is one of the most impressive homebrew projects I’ve seen in years.
- animal531 1y ago
  Oh yeah make no mistake, he's super talented!

gustavopezzi 1y ago

I share the same feeling. Programming can be an entertaining and joyful activity where enthusiasts don't really need to worry about creating something useful that will be shared with others. It's like cooking a beautiful and tasty gourmet recipe that serves only one.

atan2 1y ago
gustavo!!! your website was the first thing i thought of as i was reading this blog post. im a huge fan of your teaching style. thank you for everything you do! :-]

genericspammer 1y ago

As a toy project I can recommend re-creating the core functionality of Git. Its basic functionality beautifully simple. Checking out Linus’ first commit of Git and comparing it with my own solution was also very interesting (and humbling). If anyone is interested, here’s my toy Git implementation in Go https://github.com/emanueldonalds/shit https://github.com/emanueldonalds/shit

milgra 1y ago

Very nice collection of toy projects, I resonate with you, I also wrote a ton of toy projects in sabbaticals, check the better ones out here : https://milgra.com/ https://milgra.com/

cellularmitosis 1y ago
A one-sentence description would be a great addition to these projects. "SOV|APP|VIDEO|SOURCE" doesn't really invite a click.

CyberDildonics 1y ago

Everyone is caught up in focusing on LLMs instead of thinking about why smaller software is dramatically easier to write.

dev0p 1y ago

Very good article, but am I the only one who is seeing that this guy got Mario 64 working (somewhat) on a GameBoy Advance? That's insane.

dvektor 1y ago

Absolutely love this article, couldn't agree with this more.

sahil_sharma0 1y ago

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nesarkvechnep 1y ago

Everything is “a joy” these days, much less “could you elaborate”.

cellularmitosis 1y ago

> Orbital Mechanics Sim Here's a little toy I made. Try to keep the comet on-screen by clicking to spawn a planet: https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/gravity.html https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/gravity.html Written in C / SDL 1.2: https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/ https://ssl.pepas.com/gravity/

percentcer 1y ago

These time-to-complete estimates seem reallyyyyyy aggressive to me. I dunno maybe I'm just the slowest programmer in the world.

tessierashpool 1y ago
yeah, it's a good post overall, but the humblebrag factor undermines it

mckravchyk 1y ago

If I ever have time for it, I would love to program a rotating LED display [0] Looks like magic. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvihYPq_mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvihYPq_mQ