coding for dopamines

2024-12-11

During the last year I’ve been coding less at work. Turns out you can multiply your impact if you don’t implement everything yourself.

This has been a great in the get-stuff-done department but has however lead to a surprising unscratched itch. Now I yearn to code outside of working hours.

But what to code?

not an ideas guy

I’ve always been terrible at coming up with hobby projects that are

  1. interesting
  2. of reasonable scope

Because of this I’ve written more IRC clients and servers than anyone should ever do. It’s the goto project for me learning a new language. Just enough concurrency, just enough protocol parsing to explore a language. Maybe it’s a form of CodeKata for me, but I’m starting to think the world has already enough IRC servers. I really need to find something else to code.

algorithmic art

A while back I saw an effect in an old Amiga demo. To my surprise I recognized how it’s probably done. “Surely I can code that”, I thought to myself. After all it’s just pixels flying past the screen at different speeds depending on the distance they are from screen.

Pretty soon after I ran into the youtube channel The Coding Train which has been a great source of inspiration. It’s a funny combo of carefully explaining basics of programming and then implementing pretty hard math on top of hard-to-follow algorithms. The variance in required skill level is wild.

My key takeaway from his videos have been the recurring theme of Perlin noise usage. It’s quite powerful for natural like movement like in the block wave video above.

Implementing these simple effects proved to me there is more to coding than just creating software that can be unit tested to be correct. There can be a subjective aesthetic aspect to it.

code junkie

All this is telling me the rush of feel-good-hormones that result from solving a challenging technical problems are probably the reason why I came to be a software professional in the first place. Those moments of Heureka are currently rarer at work, but that’s ok.

I can always enjoy a few lines of recreational coding.



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