Ask HN: Haven't worked for a while, best guide/advice to start a hobby project?
I can&#x27;t exactly tell where you&#x27;re at, as far as the need for work.<p>From what I can see, it looks like you are able to keep the lights on, and you don&#x27;t need the work.<p>If so, this is where I&#x27;m at. It&#x27;s both good and bad.<p>I may be coming from a very different place, so YMMV.<p>I worked as a &quot;ship&quot; programmer and manager for over thirty years. I&#x27;ve been writing shrink-wrapped software (actual deliverable) for my entire career. It&#x27;s taught me a great deal.<p>The last decade or so, my management responsibilities meant that I couldn&#x27;t code on the job, so I created a number of open-source projects. I didn&#x27;t have a &quot;We own the ideas that you come up with in the shower&quot; clause at work, so I was free to do this.<p>They have been fairly successful, in a rather limited scope. Since all the work was initially done with a &quot;bus factor&quot; of 1, the projects are not massive; but they are very, very important to a certain demographic. They needed to be done at a professional level; not at a &quot;hobby&quot; level.<p>I am now at a place where I never need to work again, if I don&#x27;t want, but I want to work.<p>During the week, I get up every morning at 5AM, do my exercise, then roll up my sleeves, and start coding. Weekends, I let myself sleep in until 6:30AM. I&#x27;ve been doing this for the last couple of years. It is now Christmas morning. I am taking my time doing my exercise, and will get back to coding the the Bluetooth OBD driver I&#x27;m making in an hour or so.<p>Yeah, I&#x27;m obsessive.<p>I write every line of code as shipping code; even if I never plan to ship. My test harnesses are fully-qualified apps that could be released to the app store, with localization and full-fat documentation.<p>Will I work again? Maybe. I certainly have skills and experience that could make folks with established corporations a lot of money, but I&#x27;ve found they are reluctant to hire folks my age; regardless of what I&#x27;m capable of doing. I&#x27;ve set up a consulting corporation, and we&#x27;ll see where that goes. If nothing else, it gives me a structure to buy the toys I want.<p>No matter. I work as if I am writing shipping code. The satisfaction of finishing a deliverable-level project can&#x27;t be replaced. I do everything as open-source. My portfolio is <i>gigantic</i>, and is not consistent of dozens of forked projects. Just about every line of code in it was my own. My GitHub ID is solid green. I have over a decade of commit history in dozens of repos.<p>I&#x27;d suggest that you consider establishing a portfolio. Write code that is meant to be shared and re-used. Write developer utilities, drivers and tools. Test the code well. Document it well. Craft it like you are a master goldsmith, creating royal treasuries. Establish a personal&#x2F;professional brand. Decide on what that brand means, and make all your work reinforce that.<p>The world needs high-quality software. Write as a vocation; not a hobby, and whether or not anyone else values or pays for your work. If nothing else, it will be useful as an example to others.<p>Maybe find an NPO&#x2F;NGO that doesn&#x27;t have a pot to piss in, but a cause you can support. Write pro-level code for them that they could never afford on their own. That&#x27;s what I did. I can definitely say that the code I&#x27;ve written has saved lives, and restored hope.<p>It also feels great to write beautiful code. Every project I do is completely shippable, and highly-polished, with strong branding, rich UX and a great deal of documentation. I&#x27;m a reasonably good artist. I was trained as one, many moons ago.<p>For me, doing the work is its own reward. I haven&#x27;t been paid to write code in over twenty years. I don&#x27;t care. I love coding. I&#x27;ve been writing open-source stuff for most of those decades. When they stopped paying me to write code, I didn&#x27;t miss a beat, and kept writing.<p>I also like to write articles on my personal sites and Medium. I don&#x27;t particularly care if anyone reads them or not. They give me practice doing another thing that I like to do: talk about myself ;).<p>Just my $0.02.<p>Have a great holiday season!