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The Honolulu FU meeting was kind of sad. Four guys, including me, and half of them wanted to show off code they'd written for their employer. The "code for code

The Honolulu FU meeting was kind of sad. Four guys, including me, and half of them wanted to show off code they'd written for their employer. The "code for code's sake" attitude seems to be pretty rare.

peregrine 18y ago
Yep just like all of the .net user groups around here.
biohacker42 18y ago
Maybe those guys are like me and while they love to code for code's sake, their full time coding jobs and lives outside of work and the need for sleep are keeping them from coding outside of work. Trust me I keep trying to find a way to do it, but when you can only code for either an hour or two or large chunks but only on the weekend, you just can't get into flow. I keep hearing about people that can do it, and they allegedly also have friends, and fun away from the keyboard, and they supposedly are also not sleep deprived. Let's just call me an atheist about people like that.
- andreyf 18y ago
  I'm actually moving away from what you describe - a little less than a year ago, I had just finished school, my wife had a baby, and I started a demanding coding job at a startup. For about 6 months, I couldn't code outside of work for my life - I'd doze off to news.yc, RSS feed, even reddit at times. In those 6 months, though, two ideas have been snowballing - (1) that (Greasemonkey) + (code repository with dependency resolution) + (some other stuff) would be a revolutionary piece of software, and (2) that the great thing about Lisp is vaguely similar to "Dependency Injection" and "Inversion of Control" - macros (reader and otherwise) are dependencies which are injected into the reader and compiler. If I was to figure out an elegant way of doing this in JS, I can piggyback on the buzz of DI and IoC to help people think deeper about programming. Couple that with the frustration of "people don't get it unless you show them code", and I've been spending more and more nights coding away again. So my recommendation would be: 1) Get excited about something 2) Realize that you're very fortunate to have the resources to be excited about something 99% of the world does not 3) Socially commit by telling people about it (even if they don't get it)
  - biohacker42 18y ago
    Thanks for the advice.

peregrine 18y ago

Yep just like all of the .net user groups around here.

biohacker42 18y ago

Maybe those guys are like me and while they love to code for code's sake, their full time coding jobs and lives outside of work and the need for sleep are keeping them from coding outside of work. Trust me I keep trying to find a way to do it, but when you can only code for either an hour or two or large chunks but only on the weekend, you just can't get into flow. I keep hearing about people that can do it, and they allegedly also have friends, and fun away from the keyboard, and they supposedly are also not sleep deprived. Let's just call me an atheist about people like that.

andreyf 18y ago
I'm actually moving away from what you describe - a little less than a year ago, I had just finished school, my wife had a baby, and I started a demanding coding job at a startup. For about 6 months, I couldn't code outside of work for my life - I'd doze off to news.yc, RSS feed, even reddit at times. In those 6 months, though, two ideas have been snowballing - (1) that (Greasemonkey) + (code repository with dependency resolution) + (some other stuff) would be a revolutionary piece of software, and (2) that the great thing about Lisp is vaguely similar to "Dependency Injection" and "Inversion of Control" - macros (reader and otherwise) are dependencies which are injected into the reader and compiler. If I was to figure out an elegant way of doing this in JS, I can piggyback on the buzz of DI and IoC to help people think deeper about programming. Couple that with the frustration of "people don't get it unless you show them code", and I've been spending more and more nights coding away again. So my recommendation would be: 1) Get excited about something 2) Realize that you're very fortunate to have the resources to be excited about something 99% of the world does not 3) Socially commit by telling people about it (even if they don't get it)
- biohacker42 18y ago
  Thanks for the advice.