Recreational Programming

The definition perfectly describes how I started out in computers in 1981. Brought home a 4K, 8-bit computer from Radio Shack that I could barely afford and hooked it to the TV. Had never touched a computer before, zero prior knowledge and only had the manual in the box (which was surprisingly good). No one I'd ever met owned a computer at home or used one at work and I'd never really considered that you could make money with computers. I just thought the games seemed fun and the idea of learning about programming seemed cool. Turns out typing in long listings from B&W hobbyist zines and then finding all the typos was a fine way to learn.

Teaching myself assembler was harder because I had no docs. I was so clueless I actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called to ask where I could get a manual. The sales rep who answered the phone must have taken pity on me because he mailed the CPU manual for free. I still have the purple reference card and remember the common opcodes by heart (https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...)

The first time I made money was about 18 months later when I wrote a pretty handy disk utility program. Stayed up all Friday night finishing it. Copied onto floppies I sold for $5 at the local user's group Saturday morning. Made $140 and got my first 28 customers. That was enough to get me hooked on making software and selling it. ~40 years, three startups, over a dozen products, hundreds of good people employed, a couple million customers and two PC Magazine Product of the Year awards later - I regret nothing. Started on a lark to learn and have fun. Much was learned, fun was had. Wonderful journey - highly recommend.

Too bad it is all over after this year because AI killed it all :(

Thats me!!!! More than 20 years of hobby programming.

It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!

I did not like how this handled scrolling, made my navigation feel constrained. Maybe I was supposed to use the keyboard to navigate? It doesn't seem particularly clear.

This describes me, or described me - AI has brought on some existential feelings about programming as a hobby for the moment.

If painters have a canvas then programmers have a buffer.

Like the points in this presentation, recently I kept thinking it seems I need find the joy of fiddling and learning, not build some thing for money but for fun only.

Have been used some spare time to learn common lisp and write a manual project, still use web based AI as a quick search method.

But I managed to learn some common lisp and how to do cffi in common lisp and

- use gtk4 cffi binding to start a GUI app - write a ghostty cffi to encode/decode terminal escape sequences - write a libssh2 cffi to communicate with a ssh server

Hope I can build a minimal SSH Terminal using common lisp to keep on experiment and exploration

I’m definitely strong type 2, strong in the sense of I don’t care about activities of other types, not in the sense that I’m very good at programming.

I have a bunch of abandoned repos. I used to want to finish some of them, so perhaps I can show them to some people and get a in-domain job, but recently I realized that it is probably impossible for me to do so. I don’t have success because I don’t chase it. I chase fun and that’s what I should expect, not other things like career switch or monetary rewards.

Shout out to Tsoding [1]. He is my favorite recreational programmer.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily

Nice presentation, I've been asking myself about exactly this lately. Speaking for myself, I like to build a small copy of some big project, and then I put big hopes on it and start feeling guilty that it's unfinished. It turns into a kind of ban on picking up anything else, while the big one keeps getting put off too. And here there are so many different styles and approaches laid out.

A Proustian "eating the madeleine" moment occurred when I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode and began typing programs in TI BASIC, redefining characters and drawing little images with them on screen. In the midst of a tech hellscape, I suddenly remembered why I loved programming to begin with.

Painful website, tho

> Style 4: The Problem Solver

I was looking for this one. It's far beyond a mere "style". It breaks the entire premise.

Being a "problem solver" means you live with the code you write on a daily basis the same way as anyone with any other skill such as woodworking or sewing/knitting.

For the people who think writing code (without AI) is so hard that they make it a separate "thing" away from their usual life, I have to also wonder whether they can cook their own breakfast.

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