Category: Hello World

I have been messing around with some hobby coding…these are my thoughts on the process.

12/16/19

Deciding to code is one thing, deciding what to code with is another larger thing.  There are so many tools available to me as a developer.  I have spent most of my development time in the past working with WordPress and Asp.net type things.  I probably cannot even link up to a Linux server with SSH if you offered me a million dollars to do so.  The question is what tools, languages and frameworks are even worth messing with?  This is where I get to be a business analyst for a few minutes. 

I want to work with technology that lets me do cool things, and might make me employable.  These are good criteria.  My bent has been towards using various Microsoft technologies because that is where most of my experience had been.  I am also open to doing some PHP and LAMP stack development.  I looked at all the recent job postings for developers in the area and these tech stacks seem to be used a fair amount in the area.  There is also a lot of talk about React and Angular, I don’t know how I feel about big JavaScript things at the moment though.  These things seem to change pretty fast, and I’m not sure about building my house on that particular sand.  So for now I will use JavaScript as it comes to me, but not get too deep. 

With these considerations I have decided to play with DotNet things and LAMP type stacks.  These stacks line up with my experience the most, so I can leverage that into building more cooler things fasterer.  I don’t see much job potential locally with full stack JavaScript, so that is a maybe later kind of thing.  I am not looking for a job coding at the moment, but employability is a good tiebreaker when it comes to picking tech to focus on.  I do like the fact that these are big stacks with lots of stuff around them in the ecosystem.  I see no need to jump into niche stuff just for the sake of doing it.  That decision will make itself when the time comes. 

The process of picking technologies was rather simple, I think I made good choices here.  Next up is building some cool and useful stuff, or napping, or listening to history podcasts.  All options are available to me.

It was a cold winter Saturday afternoon.  I had nothing on my schedule, I started poking around the computer and internet.  Before long I was downloading Visual Studio 2019.  I was feeling like messing with some coding and programming for fun.  Developer stuff has always been rather fun when I remove the time pressures and other pressures associated with it.  I wanted to play with some code, I wanted it to be fun, I am not sure if it will mean anything to my career at large.  Despite the fact coding might have zero career benefits at the moment, it seems as though it might be a great hobby to play with.

I spent about 5 years waist deep in being a web developer muddling about becoming a rather flawed developer.  I haven’t had much reason to code much in the last year, life has taken turns elsewhere.  I still have that skillset laying dormant and I would like to keep it.  Doing some hobby coding seems like it could keep that stuff alive in my mind.  It is not anywhere my top priority at the moment, so I am looking to approach it with a few rules, otherwise it becomes another out of control hobby.

Rule 1. I will be coding for fun, and not putting any hard effort into it, otherwise it will take away energy from other things that are far more important.

Rule 2. This is all a hobby and a learning experiment.  It is to be treated as such, you know until some outside force like a job incentivizes me to view it in another way.

Rule 3.  This is a night and weekend kind of thing.  It is not work and can’t be treated as such, otherwise I will be messing with code when I should be doing something that is actually beneficial to me.

These are the rules I made with myself as I started to play with code that night.  I think they are reasonable.  In the past developer skills have always been something I was chasing impatiently.  I think it would be fun to give it a try and just build quirky and fun things and see what happens. 

I don’t really have any goals with this.  To a degree I am doing this because I want a hobby that gets my brain away from fitness and writing based things.  It can be fun to work on things that don’t matter.

So far I have installed new development tools, and started messing with some Asp.net Core to see what that is all about.  I might not ever look at the code again, but the other night it was fun.  So I get to call myself a developer again for a few days.