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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 stress

by 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).

by Swizec 1y ago

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).