Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
TL;DR: 1. no offense 2. mee too 3. join the elite club 4. pet projects 5. teach<p>1. First of all, don&#x27;t take what I write as a personal attack; I am a bit aspie, and can&#x27;t detect the fine distinction between being honest vs rude, I&#x27;m just unable to separate. Also, I don&#x27;t speak English very well, so I may use phrases, which I think different that it sounds.<p>2. Sorry, dude, you&#x27;re only an average programmer - as I am. I have 32 years of experience in software development, started at age 18, and I&#x27;m programming since I&#x27;m 13, but I would have started earlier if there had been computers (in a socialist&#x2F;communist country, see COCOM list). I&#x27;m pretty good at setting up a moldel, a solution, choosing platform and tools, writing well-readable, fast and resilient code. My superpower is to cut out features, which looks necessary, but I know they aren&#x27;t, and I&#x27;m always right. I am not too good at math, okay, bool algebra is my blood, and I can set up good KPIs, but other areas, e.g. trigonometry (not a random pick, see later) is not my table. Also, sometimes I create music, not the dumb write-one-pattern-then-switch-on-off-tracks style, but normal pop, smooth jazz, house, rock, punk etc. stuff. I love to make covers. Restricted platforms is my real home, writing music for C16&#x2F;Plus4, ringtone, buzzer, bytebeat etc.<p>3. As I said, I&#x27;m pretty average. I&#x27;m not measuring myself to clerks, bus drivers and our PM, not even to usual programmers. There&#x27;s a scene, where we count as &quot;nice try&quot; or &quot;well, interesting&quot;. This arena is called <i>demoscene</i> (a good intro: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wise-geek.com&#x2F;what-is-a-demoscene.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wise-geek.com&#x2F;what-is-a-demoscene.htm</a>). I am a medium-low known member of this community. As I&#x27;m not too good in math (remember, 3D), which is recommended in this genre, and also I&#x27;m not 16 yo any more, so I have no time to release full demos requires months of work of more people, I found my way in the sizecoding category, I am releasing and contributing in 256-byte intros (and also musics, of course). As sizecoder, I still count below-average-talented, other dudes are writing raytracers and other jaw-dropping effects in 256 byte (usually we use 16-bit x86 code), so I&#x27;m trying to shine out doing funny or unusual things. For example, one of my latest intro plays a 549 notes piano piece on the MIDI interface (my friend helped to optimize it out, also there&#x27;s a presentation about how it&#x27;s made <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ern0&#x2F;549notes&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;prez" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ern0&#x2F;549notes&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;prez</a>).<p>So, if you feel yourself lonely because you&#x27;re high above the average folks, come, join demoscene, and feel yourself lonely on the other end of the spectrum, above the average. Okay, it&#x27;s not true, not every demoscener is pure genius, but they&#x27;re way above average, so you&#x27;ll enjoy. Sometimes these guys are weird, but this is a usual side effect. If they accept you (don&#x27;t worry, we&#x27;re not complete jerks), it will be a good feeling to belong to such smart people. Not least, it&#x27;s a great _inspiration_!<p>4. You not mentioned, but I assume you have pet projects. It&#x27;s a fatal mistake to not have pet projects. This is the difference between Real Programmers and this-is-my-job-meh. Even if you work as Universal Problem Solver, there will be several areas which you never deal with before, and some of these are too interesting to just ignore them.<p>I show you an example. Thanks God (despite I&#x27;m atheist&#x2F;agnostic) that I don&#x27;t have to deal with web dev, but I was curious what the heck WASM is (web without JavaScript, doesn&#x27;t it sound good?!), and wanted to write just a plain helloworld C program for it to try it out... and there were no such, all examples were for Rust&#x2F;Emscripten, so I made a small skeleton: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkbroker.hu&#x2F;stuff&#x2F;howto-wasm-minimal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkbroker.hu&#x2F;stuff&#x2F;howto-wasm-minimal&#x2F;</a> - it became somewhat famous, a bunch of folks thanked it, finally I felt that it wasn&#x27;t complete waste the time spent with it (2-3 nights).<p>A special area of pet projects is, where not-too-complicated electronics plays role - keyword is: Arduino. It&#x27;s a pure joy, even if only a small led blinks in your hand, driven by the program you wrote!<p>If you have such pet projects, sorry for the redundancy.<p>5. As I&#x27;m getting older, I&#x27;m creating presentations from my pet projects and other experiences more and more often. Remember your early career, it would be great if someone had explained clearly how things work: pullup resistor, abstract syntax tree (compiler tech.), version control, key-value databases, LaTeX, build systems, Unix pipes etc.<p>If you can suggest optimal solutions for a certain problem at work, you should not only justify why you chose that solution, but you should also teach how to do it.<p>Oh, needless to say: Maybe I&#x27;m Wrong. Your way might be complete different, I don&#x27;t want to iterfere your life (as silly joke goes: - Have a good day! - Please, don&#x27;t tell me how to life!).