On my desk there’s a personal journal. One with pages made of actual paper.

A million apps for personal writing out there miss the point by a light year. First of all, handwriting feels nice because the specific physical act stimulates brain cells; in second place, you cannot riffle with your thumb a journal that is not made of actual paperpages. And, yes, riffling through pages feels good.

On my desk there’s also a pen, three actually but two are just pens and one is a Parker, a phone case, a storage pendrive (yes, that old thing), scattered pieces of paper and a notepad for todos. I mean an actual notepad with paper pages. That thing is there because another million apps for todos lists out there miss another key point: silence makes thinking, and planning, better, and computers are not silent, and I can almost hear right now the stupid ringtone of Outlook. On the cover of this notepad I scribbled “Stupid work”, just so I don’t forget what it’s for, and because, let’s be frank, work is stupid most of the time.

Which brings me to the point.

Hobby

We have all read on the internet that ten thousand hours is a well-known estimate of how long it takes to become good at something. I doubt if that’s any accurate, but hard practice is, without doubts, the key to mastering most of everything.

I said that so the next sentence comes without surprise effect: most programmers have made a hobby of their craft. That is the same for musicists, chess players, video game players, professional athletes, to name a few types. Skilled people in these categories spent countless hours practicing, to the point that practicing was a hobby, especially at a young age. As for me, in the years corresponding to 17yo-28yo I spent a disproportionate amount of time staring at, reading and writing computer code. Disproportionate, that is, to the number of hours that we are given in a day.

Music, chess, programming, a few more things, have one feature in common that allows the passion to grow into an obsession, and the duty to become a hobby: they are self-contained. One only needs a guitar, or a chessboard, or a computer, and, potentially, can figure out everything else on her own. Programming (and music, and chess) is a world of its own. And if the same person is, at the same time, enrolled in a SE degree then, well, you get what I am saying.

Particularly in the programming case, this self-contained world encourages the hard practice that comes from making new stuff. Building, that is. Throughout those years, I spent my own free time coding optimization for NP, making a new language with its compiler, literally making a computer from elementary circuits (okay, almost), getting a second programming job for the evening hours, then getting a third programming job for the weekends. Making to-do apps, making websites, making APIs, making a chess engine, and let me stop here, because I am, even if in a small part, ashamed of the staggering amount of time that I spent doing…that.

And then, there’s the business world, which so easily mingles with and corrupts the engineer. Countless business ideas for which making a MVP only takes a couple of weeks of evenings work, for then it leads to nowhere, or rather it leads to the next MVP and the next couple of weeks of nightly programming.

On the bright side of it, those who have done these drills over and over, especially at younger ages, have a different gear. They are like african runners to the rest of us joggers. They seem to speak with the machine. Especially their debugging and troubleshooting skills are from another world. That is cool, and, more importantly, very useful at work, with one caveat: they get bored at work. They have to work with the brake pulled, things look silly, or trivial, or stupid, or all of those at once. Which makes them want to do the real thing outside of work, like a hobby - again!

Time wins

Life is not still though, and time changes everything (who said it fixes anything?).

I did feel a shift at some point, and even if it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in time, the feeling was (is) very clear. We all wish to do brilliant things at work, to write the piece of code that nobody has written before, to architect the system that nobody has thought of before, and to solve the problems in a better way than the others, but it just doesn’t work like that. Business does corrupt engineering, and kills creativity, and — let’s be frank again — companies will always prefer three not-too-bright people who don’t mind churning away 60 hours/week of bad code over one rock star coder who gets everything done in 16 hours a week and then is bored to death.

And even though boredom will initially sparkle the fight (“I am going to build a rocket ship in my free time!”), the rage ultimately, with age, fades away and leaves space to…what? I think it’s disillusionment. And a cagey feeling, because we all need the vile money. And, in the end, the understanding that hobbies must change with time. Passions come and go.

Today I had an idea to google “do you code as hobby reddit”, and Reddit never disappoints. It is worth a read.

Pardon any typos

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