Comment by muzani

3 days ago

A mantra that worked for me: Productive engineers are happy engineers. Happy engineers are productive engineers. It's a self-sustaining loop.

One option is a minimum of happiness - brightly lit office, decent food, music.

The other option is a minimum of productivity. I like to wash dishes after a bad day lol. Work from office. Use AI to handle the blank page problem (you can reject everything it says afterwards).

The trick with side projects is to complete and ship them. The first side project should be limited to 10 hours max. Sometimes shipping is the hard part. Once you can do this, add more time. Do 20 hours, 40 hours, 100 hours, and so on. But progressively. If you start by making the world's greatest something, it will drain all your motivation and energy, especially once the bloat kicks in.

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muzani

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hnquestion12345  3 days ago

My living situation has been a bit chaotic over the last few years, mostly moving around between family members so I haven't really had a good working environment. Usually just a spot I can place my laptop down. I do think a better environment would help me out. Sometimes I go to Ikea and wish I could have a nice desk and setup.

It's funny you mention washing dishes because that's one of my favorite ways to relax haha. I really enjoy things like that but when I see all of things people are doing, especially on this site, I start to feel like, okay I have to create something cool to keep up. I feel like I can't just enjoy simple hobbies like reading and drawing without doing something "meaningful".

I'm really going to try the side project thing. The things I want to create always end up so grand in scale. Yesterday I had an idea and I was already looking for best ways to make it cross-platform before I even did anything with the idea. All the stuff around that takes away from the fun of the idea and adds so much complexity and I just let it go.

  • mesotron_dev  3 days ago

    Rent a private office. Preferably with 24-hour access. Wifi is a bonus and commonly included. It helps to have dedicated workspaces. A coffee shop could work if it has a good setup for coding & good coffee. Create the space for the project, and then you'll have the time for side projects.

    As for design it takes time but being able to dedicate time to the top-down grand scheme and then go bottom-up is crucial for any size project. What are the fundamental requirements? Keep it simple. Deconstruct all aspects into single-purpose functions. One input, one output, & repeat. The ongoing pattern is to change the level of abstraction used for reviewing the project at any range, from a function to the whole project. These reflexes take time to build, and working on a side project daily is an excellent way to discover what patterns work best for your programming style and the project you're working on.

    And big project ideas provide a field of side projects to discover. So wade into the water and find some fundamental piece of your larger idea. And then zoom in on that. When you're considering optimizations of compiled code to run a single binary on a static empty container image, you've gone deep enough.

d--b  3 days ago

> I like to wash dishes after a bad day lol

Man, there is so much wisdom in that single sentence. I didn't think I'd read something like this here. Kudos for figuring that out and thanks for spelling it out so clearly.

Readers who think this is silly, please think twice.

  • muzani  3 days ago

    Credit to a severely depressed friend for this one. After doing the cycle of therapist, pills, self-help books, etc, what helped the most was housework. It didn't solve the problems, but it kept her going day after day.

    There's actual research on happiness a while back, and it ended with the concept of flow. Csikszentmihalyi found that people were unhappiest when watching TV and happiest when doing something of moderate challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

    But why is TV the natural response to stress?

    I think people in an exploitative culture have trouble with work. There's the mindset that the rich are where they deserve to be because they exploit, while the scrubs that work hard are where they deserve to be because they're exploitable. So there's an aversion to productivity, and people think the escape is apathy.

    But there's also some human nature to be productive and contribute; unproductive genes would likely go extinct. And there's also a desire to be challenged. A desire to move things from a state of chaos to order.