Write more "useless" software

https://ntietz.com/blog/write-more-useless-software/

by greenSunglass • 3 years ago

846 254 3 years ago

I’ve learned a lot by just rewriting stuff that already works. Not because I need the new software, but because making something compatible is a great way to discover the edge cases of the existing software.

ozim• 3 years ago

Just like drawing, everyone draws still life to train or figure out their issues.

It doesn’t matter that there are dozens of those drawings made by all the people.

ronsor• 3 years ago

Reimplementing other software is one of the most rewarding exercises in frustration that exist.

sowbug• 3 years ago

It's surprisingly fun to focus on the how, rather than the what, with the safety net of knowing the what will still be something worthwhile.

flukus• 3 years ago

Almost 20 years ago we had to write our own database with indexing for a software dev class. It was crap by every definition possible

But that learning experience and having a rough idea of what sql is doing under the hood is still useful to me every day.

cellularmitosis• 3 years ago

Reimplementing classic games (Pong, Tetris, Snake) sits at a great spot along the effort-to-reward curve.

lencastre• 3 years ago

I’m building my own de duplication because I found some edge cases

ramesh31• 3 years ago

A terrible chess engine and UI, riddled with bugs, which taught me about GUI programming and game programming, and led to a more thorough understanding of how chess engines work.

This is my number one advice to anyone interested in game dev. Don't think that you need to sit around and come up with the most amazing novel mechanics and flashy graphics or novel-length story. Just start making games. Implement Chess, or Go, or Poker. Learn how engines work and focus on the core of what actually makes a game fun and engaging. Some of the best studios today cut their teeth on silly shovelware titles, and so should you.

slmjkdbtl2• 3 years ago

I majored in Game design in college, every semester we would make one game for the final project. To be honest a lot of my classmates suck at making games, but still, we can get a good laugh and fun time when playing the "bad games". That's when I really started to love games, they don't need to be "good" to bring joy! That's also when I got into communities like Glorious Trainwrecks[0] that focuses on making "bad" games, a lot of people I see there are the most creative people I've seen in my life.

[0] https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/

antidnan• 3 years ago

HN Hug of death?

m4632• 3 years ago

https didn't work, http said "malware and phishing"

notlion• 3 years ago

Comcast SecurityEdge blacklist strikes again?

thesarl• 3 years ago

I love writing expressive, joyful software. To learn or explore. It's what hooked me, and what keeps me programming.

Unfortunately, needs get in the way. Under threat of starvation I must be productive. I care about those I am productive with, and I feel guilty when not producing. It drains my motivation even in my personal time.

It's amazing to see so many people with the stability and freedom to express themselves. Those who have the means to go to the Recurse Center, or those with many personal projects or a myriad of blog posts describing their escapades. I'm envious, but happy for them. Most have worked hard to get to where they can carve out a life like that for themselves. I'd love to do that too.

The only way to do so, it seems, is to burn more life on productivity. With enough years burnt in sacrifice, perhaps luck will be tempted to grant me the right to live. It's funny.

I'll enjoy writing more useless software then.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 3 years ago

Like so many things in life, if you put it off "until I can afford it," you'll probably never have it.

josephg• 3 years ago

I absolutely agree. I went to clown school recently (thats a whole story) and I realised I've been focusing way too much on trying to get projects "right" or "do them well". This is really silly. Life is for living, and I squeeze the fun out of software when I try too hard to do it "right".

So instead, I'm trying to have a lot more fun with the code I write and I'm finding I've been writing way more code. Its flowing more easily. I've recently written my own protobuf-style library for binary serialization (to try out some fun ideas around schema evolution). And at the moment I'm writing a simple CRDT based local first database. I got the first data syncing yesterday! Its really exciting.

Its funny - over the years I've written a lot of code to solve Serious Problems and I've written a lot of code on a whim, to scratch my own itch. Ironically, the code I'm most proud of has often ended up being the stuff I did for fun. I find I keep coming back to maintain and improve the fun projects, but the serious projects languish and die once I move on.

nocoiner• 3 years ago

Congrats on your admission to Princeton!

itsmemattchung• 3 years ago

clown school

Please please please elaborate on this. I can probably guess what clown school is but ... what's the motivation here?!

reidjs• 3 years ago

He doesn't have to justify his desire to go to clown school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUk19cWarI

gregsadetsky• 3 years ago

clown school is great. it can take many forms too - there are classes, workshops, school-schools (i.e. some 1-day, some months-long)

a famous clown school is Philippe Gaulier's. famously, Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, etc.) went (and unsurprisingly excelled) there.

this is a short/good? small snippet re: Gaulier's school - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD4YFuJT0_E

but there's a lot more to it - there are schools and communities in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, ... everywhere? just as you'd find improv classes and communities all around the world.

as for motivation -- I'm not OP, but for me, it can be the same reasons that drive people to learn acting, or improv, or dancing, or meditation, or horse back riding. something about it is about exploring a new "thing" (being on stage, performing) and some is about exploring yourself (your limits, your subconscious, your inner child, etc.)

you should try it if you haven't. everyone should. :*)

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

Clowns are the last job that can be taken by AI.

yung_steezy• 3 years ago

That's it! You've all been holding me back too long. I'm going to clown college!

vsareto• 3 years ago

This is really silly. Life is for living, and I squeeze the fun out of software when I try too hard to do it "right".

TBH the incentives are usually not there for that effort. That gets people doing the bare minimum. It would be another thing if most developers had comp that scaled with how good your code does.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.

pastorhudson• 3 years ago

I had this same observation playing factorio. When I started I made spaghetti factories with a friend and had to constantly refactor as requirements changed in the game. It was a blast. Then we started getting into optimization and suddenly there was only one right way to do it. Overnight all the fun was sucked out of the game.

Often I will learn more by building things poorly with hubris and whimsy. “How hard can it be?” has gotten me in way over my head so many times. But I always learn a ton and discover fun digging my way out.

Grimburger• 3 years ago

clown school

The fact that everyone is either assuming this is an actual clown school or an Ivy League university is telling.

krapp• 3 years ago

For the sake of their dignity I hope it's an actual clown school.

hyperthesis• 3 years ago

  I used to *enjoy* doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to *play* with it.  I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html

glouwbug• 3 years ago

Functions, while loops, if statements. What more can you need?

skydhash• 3 years ago

With lisp, I only need functions.

CableNinja• 3 years ago

Youre missing the Pepe Silva strewn classes that tie into each other intricately, and in some occasions are abstraction layers of abstraction layers

kirso• 3 years ago

I think there is this concept of min/maxing in games that resonates in other areas of our lives.

In a game instead of going with the flow and trusting the process people tend to start reading guides how to make the most OP character, maximise stats, and make it a 100% completion.

This approach eventually sucks out the pleasure of exploration and random encounters that made the games so good and instead makes people spend hours on trying to maximise stats in a random dice roll fashion.

Similarly with other activities, the sense of wonder and "just because" goes out as we are all trying to max out something, whether its wealth or code quality.

Pannoniae4• 3 years ago

to be fair, that's partly the fault of the games themselves too. When the game does not provide immersion or a good story, all left is minmaxing. Developers who only add "content" and not actual memorable experiences make it so players just try to grind the game as fast as possible because they don't fundamentally enjoy the game loop, they just play for the extrinsic rewards (loot, skins, completion, achievements, whatever).

even games like minecraft are minmaxing now, even though it used to be all sorts of creative things, since the game encourages minmaxing and discourages anything else. (just see how things like minecarts, redstone etc. have been utterly neglected - in favour of exploiting elytras, villagers and building farms)

eru4• 3 years ago

This approach eventually sucks out the pleasure of exploration and random encounters [...]

Oh, that depends entirely on the game and what your mood is. In something like Opus Magnum that min-maxing is the entire point. In something like Factorio or Oxygen Not Included you can have fun both with bumbling around or with min-maxing.

Also have a look at https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for some perspective. Playing to Win can be fun and rewarding. See especially the chapter https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/love-of-the-game-not-playing...

Now it’s time for what appears to be the opposite point of view: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did, you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing suboptimal tactics.

irjustin• 3 years ago

In a game instead of going with the flow and trusting the process people tend to start reading guides how to make the most OP character, maximise stats, and make it a 100% completion.

I want to be the very best....

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

My role model when it comes to entrepreneurship (curious, kind, focused on sustainability and real value) is my outlaw*, also a clown!

I wrote about him earlier somewhere on HN, but here's a quick note describing his approach to work:

https://untested.sonnet.io/Physical+uncolouring+book#How+wou...

I thought you might enjoy reading this :)

PS. Always bet on clowns.

* father in law but from a previous marriage

lucasfcosta• 3 years ago

Totally agree with the sentiment. Also, "useless" is a totally subjective label.

I think it's worth quoting PG on this one:

Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think.

bombcar• 3 years ago

And remember that the largest toy company is worth billions of dollars. Toys can be serious business.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

Nvidia and Epic were built with gaming money. Now they are almost vital technologies with all sorts of useful non-gaming applications

fifafu• 3 years ago

Apple once rejected an app of mine for being "useless". App review even called me to tell me my app is useless and will not be approved to the Mac App Store.

~12 years later thousands of people have used that little useless app (KeyboardCleanTool, a very small free app to block all keyboard / touch bar input). People have used that app in ways I'd never have imagined (e.g. letting toddlers hack on their keyboards or letting their cats sleep on the laptop).

What is useful or not is really subjective.

alsetmusic• 3 years ago

I’m aware of your app. Seems pretty brilliant to me.

My mother accidentally turned on our computer (Mac IIsi) when cleaning while I was a kid. I successfully turned that into the justification for why we needed the After Dark screensaver. Flying toasters soon graced my screen. Ah, nostalgia…

bGl2YW5j• 3 years ago

I've benefitted from your app! Thank you for the awesome anecdote.

mysterydip• 3 years ago

how did you get it approved?

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

It is published outside of the apple app store.

NL8072• 3 years ago

Fortunately macOS apps don't have to be installed through the Appstore system. There are third party stores.

orangecat• 3 years ago

I've wanted that for years, thank you! Apparently nobody at Apple has a cat.

ok_dad• 3 years ago

Cat like typing detected

http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/

jerrysievert2• 3 years ago

When I desperately needed to clean my keyboard, I was searching for how best to clean a MacBook keyboard. Your app kept coming up and I kept laughing it off thinking, “yeah, how can an app clean the keyboard, will it fake shake it until it’s clean?”

It wasn’t until about 10 searches later I found a decent article about the best way to clean your keyboard, with a shout out to your app for being able to lock the keyboard.

Finally, it clicked and I downloaded it - quite useful for a “useless” app - thanks for making it and maintaining it!

foundart2• 3 years ago

I turn my laptop off to clean it and avoid the power button while doing the cleaning. Was this not an option for you?

luigi23• 3 years ago

It wasnt useless, it was their way of telling ‘not suitable for average user because they can lock themselves in and were gonna take the heat’

Isthatablackgsd• 3 years ago

I love your app! It is perfect for my MBA M1. I was annoyed there wasn't an option to temporarily disable the keyboard for cleaning. I found your app through brew.

jbaber• 3 years ago

In Linux, I switch to a vty (ctrl-alt-f4) and don't log into it when I want to disable the keyboard.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 3 years ago

I would think in most cases some sort of lock would be fine - whether that's switching to a getty, calling xscreensaver/gnome-screensaver/whatever, or whatever your platform's equivalent is.

Quiark• 3 years ago

TBH I just switch to the lock screen if I need that

albertzeyer2• 3 years ago

We did some video meetings (or online sport sessions) during corona, and our toddler always wanted to play around with the computer.

knlam• 3 years ago

I will save this comment whenever someone defend the apple wallgarden

willi59549879• 3 years ago

i refuse to call apple a walled garden. To me it is plainly a prison, doesn't play well with anything outside

alin23• 3 years ago

Thanks for KeyboardCleanTool! I’ve used it for years, and it inspired me to add a similar function called Cleaning Mode in my Lunar app: https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#cleaning-mode

I needed the MacBook screen and monitors to be completely black while cleaning so I can see the dust that would result in scratches if cleaned with a cloth. I also needed the trackpad to be disabled and an easy to press key combo to turn off cleaning mode (I arrived on spamming the Command key at least 8 times as a combo, hard to accidentally press, easy to remember)

I’m always annoyed by Apple’s practices in app review, why would they decide for users what is useful and what isn’t? Not to mention the scams that pass review and are left to live in the App Store for months.

albertzeyer2• 3 years ago

Oh interesting, I wrote something very similar: https://github.com/albertz/mac-suppress-mouse-keyboard

It also blocks mouse presses.

The only way to unblock is to type in a special sequence of letters on the keyboard. But an on-screen display will tell you what to type.

It was mostly for my toddler.

coopierez• 3 years ago

Funny you should mention, I just needed to clean my keyboard yesterday and I was looking for a way to disable my keyboard without turning off my PC. Thanks for your app!

john-tells-all• 3 years ago

Pfft I used your "useless" app! I wanted to clean the keyboard and the app lets me do that without shutting the computer down. Very happy! Thanks.

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

In 2023, I've written a LOT of useless software. I've built 1 feature complete product [0], 2 kinda-feature complete products [1], and a bunch of half-finished stuff.

Unfortunate for me, none of them generated any revenue.

But it's been a fantastic experience refining a lot of the rough edges on how to build faster. Biggest gain for me has been speed; each project, I get a bit faster because I've ironed out some unknown along the way. It's crazy looking back how much I built in 6-ish months.

[0] https://turas.app

[1] https://coderev.app, https://zeeq.ai

[3] e.g. https://github.com/CharlieDigital/hekaton, other contract projects

susam• 3 years ago

This is very timely because I completed writing a useless software just a few minutes ago:

CFR Brackets: https://susam.net/cfr.html

Demo: https://susam.net/cfr.html#3

Source: https://github.com/susam/cfr

It is a very minimal drawing language that supports only 5 commands: C (change colour), F (move forward), R (rotate), [ (begin block), and ] (repeat block). The commands are slightly inspired by the Logo programming language. The minimal nature is inspired by P′′. However, unlike both, this is not Turing complete.

No practical usage is intended. I wrote it for fun and I am hoping to have some more fun with it trying to draw interesting shapes using it while keeping the input code as small as possible.

“I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.” -- Alan J. Perlis

steve_adams_86• 3 years ago

I used to feel like writing useful software was the mark of a competent software developer, and I wouldn’t allow myself to spend time doing things which weren’t overtly useful in ways which were easy to communicate.

That’s a great way to make software a chore. I’ve since become comfortable creating useless stuff. It’s fun. I reiterate existing ideas in new ways because I don’t care if it has been done already. I will even do it in the same way someone else did if it’s just for kicks, like covering someone else’s song. You learn, you have fun, it’s worthwhile. And sometimes you find ways to improve it!

I learned this by getting into writing firmware. It was too daunting to be useful all the time, and I had to really let my ego deflate and get out of the way. It turned out to be a ton of fun, writing crappy code to do stupid things. It also turned out to be an awesome way to get out of my own way and let myself learn and experience ideas in a low-pressure and enjoyable way.

Plus as others have mentioned, useless stuff winds up being surprisingly useful. Every useless thing I’ve done in the last couple of years has wound up contributing useful code, if not insights and knowledge, that I didn’t expect. It’s great.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

one of the reasons to write more 'useless' software is I think also that for most people it's a straight up better use of their recreational time.

At some point I got sick of watching The Office for the 20th time or just aimlessly clicking around on Youtube. Programming is a hell of a lot more stimulating even if no good software comes out of it.

smith-kyle• 3 years ago

My pride and joy: http://lipsislips.com

interleave• 3 years ago

That was unexpectedly fun :D Turns out: Lips _are_ lips!

arcastroe• 3 years ago

My girlfriend and I had fun with this, thanks for sharing!

As a sidenote, letsencrypt.com is free :)

dingi• 3 years ago

This is a funny little game man. Thanks for sharing.

atum47• 3 years ago

What do you mean useless? Dial is going to revolutionize the way people insert numbers.

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/dial

asalahli4• 3 years ago

Woah, let me know when the kickstarter campaign for a physical version is live!

Minor49er4• 3 years ago

This is not just about writing "useless" software, but also advocating for avoiding so-called "best practices" in small projects

I made a static site generator for an item catalog. The catalog is simple and doesn't change much. I was debating on which database system to employ and ultimately just decided that I'll drop everything into a static array right in the codebase. It's one less dependency to think about and works perfectly fine for my purposes

penjelly4• 3 years ago

i dont consider "not using a database" as a "best practice". a best practice is more like: use the best tool for the task at hand. What you describe would be in-line with this example.

Minor49er4• 3 years ago

Fair point. But what if there suddenly needs to be a huge expansion in the catalog? What if I need to change or modify several attributes suddenly? How can this thing scale? Ack!

tommychillfiger2• 3 years ago

Seems like you're agreeing with the person you're replying to. They said the article advocates for avoiding best practices for small projects, and then they provided an example of when they did that - they avoided a "best practice" because it wasn't really practical or important for the task.

opportune• 3 years ago

I mean, I completely agree that you should always use the best tool to get the job done and should skip a lot of best practices if the payoff isn’t there. It’s good advice that trumps “best practices” but it’s not really what people mean when they refer to “best practices” and I think you know that.

The problem really is just that people don’t understand that “best practices” are not unconditional rules, but simplified advice representing the common experiences of thousands of people doing the same thing as you. Also, more experienced people like you and me know when it’s safe to break them but that’s a lot less obvious to less experienced people.

eichin• 3 years ago

Ooh, you figured this out early. I had a project back around 1998 where we were using Oracle "because it was there" for a content store... I was doing a performance review and concluded that "we shipped new software more often than we changed any of the data, and should have just compiled it in to the product". (Never did find out if that got done - it was a "we're out of interesting problems" thing and I moved on - but after that it was always my first question when "we need a database" reared its head :-)

runeks2• 3 years ago

I just made the same decision for a hobby project. The current version basically just queries a dataset, ie. no modification of the data (no create/delete/update). I realized it makes almost no sense to store read-only data in a database when I just pull out all the data anyway into memory to run a graph algorithm on it (no way I'm implementing Bellman-Ford in SQL!).

barryrandall• 3 years ago

"Appropriate practices" beat "best practices" every time.

donglitao• 3 years ago

I have a friend who incorporates everything he learns into his open-source projects. Initially, it was a showcase of his best practices, and now his open-source projects have gained significant popularity.

sanderjd3• 3 years ago

Honestly, I quite strongly believe it is a "best practice" to use static data in code (or a file packaged along with the code and read in at startup or package compilation time) up until the moment it no longer works. It doesn't seem to be a widely agreed upon one in my experience though, which is a shame.

qup• 3 years ago

I think this recent thread ("Half-baked projects") has a similar theme, and I really enjoyed it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857231

z500• 3 years ago

Man I always miss these. I have so much half-baked stuff to show off!

azhenley2• 3 years ago

See my blog post from 2021, “Why I prefer making useless stuff”

https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html

famahar• 3 years ago

The link seems to be dead

azhenley2• 3 years ago

Sorry, fixed. I forgot all my academic URLs are now dead.

syndicatedjelly5• 3 years ago

I just read Part 1 of your Teeny Tiny Compiler series and thought it was fantastic.

kierstennordin• 3 years ago

I feel like this is one of the unintuitive things about any "craft". If you do more of it, period, it generally still makes you better in the end. Write bad short stories. Throw ugly pots. Paint wonky landscapes.

Maybe it's the practice, but I feel like it's also our tendency to talk ourselves out of an idea if we can't fully see an end-product we're excited about. It feels like a smart decision, especially if you're overly analytical—you're saving wasted time! But it's also a sure fire way to make sure you never create anything at all. I've had a lot of "useless" software projects remain "useless", but I've also had some that have found more utility in the journey.

We're landing among a few cliches here (you miss 100% of the shots you don't take!, etc. etc.), but you get it.

burntalmonds• 3 years ago

“I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.”

--Van Gogh

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

When I was skateboarding as an early teen I remember wondering if “keep trying” would eventually end up in learning to do an ollie or just become excellent at failing at doing an ollie.

harph• 3 years ago

Skateboarding taught me the power of perserverance, and muscle memory. That and Quake 3: Defrag trickjumping.

m4632• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231018213232/https://ntietz.co...

smcameron• 3 years ago

A long time ago I used to run a meetup group, the "Houston Recreational Computer Programming Group", which was almost but not quite entirely concerned with showing off useless fun software projects. Was a lot of fun, though I've moved away and I'm not sure the town I'm in now is large enough to muster such a group or if I have the energy to run such a group anymore.

One good thing (for me) about it was that once a month, I was forced to come up with some little project to show off, just in case nobody else brought anything to the table, the table wouldn't be empty (only happened a couple times in 2 years or so). One of those little projects[1] turned out really cool and I'm quite proud of it, and it's not entirely useless.

[1] https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus

reaperman• 3 years ago

Thank you for your work helping to build the culture of TX/RX labs. They've really thrived since then.

pard68• 3 years ago

Seeing everything as a new startup or money maker is so unhealthy. There is a whole world to live in and explore and chasing money will never help you find it.

lasagna_coder3• 3 years ago

interestingly, i find that many of the things that also make money aren't even really useful, they just exist and people want them for some obscure reason. so you're right, and also it might actually lead to making money anyway because what might seem useless doesn't exclude valuable.

bashmelek• 3 years ago

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that “real artists shitpost”. They will play with their craft and make something stupid, all as a form of recreation and expression.

zX41ZdbW• 3 years ago

I like writing useless software because its use, if any, will exceed initial expectations. Examples:

https://reversedns.space/

https://github.com/ClickHouse/NoiSQL

https://pastila.nl/

ydant• 3 years ago

https://reversedns.space/

That's a really cool visualization of the IPv4 space. It's fun to look at it like that. Thank you for sharing.

Did you consider adding an option for lookup in the tooltip and/or coloring by ASN info? It seems it'd be really interesting to see the clusters that would emerge from that.

distract8901• 3 years ago

Writing dumb little programs to automate some trivially annoying task is one of my favorite things to do. I get to play around with UI design, or build some hideous monstrosity out of reflection and polymorphic generic classes. I get to play with parts of the language I don't normally use. Who cares if it's ugly or slow? It runs once a week, it doesn't matter so long as it works.

I wouldn't really call these programs useless, but I could definitely live without them. The way I like to think about it is making little programs that make my computer suck less.

whartung• 3 years ago

I’ve done lots of “useless” software.

  * Lexers, Parsers, Compilers
  * Shortest path, traveling salesman
  * Physics sims, numerical methods 
  * Discrete event simulation 
  * Document formatter
  * Tried to add a GUI Tab pane context and lifecycle to Java CDI. Yea, that just doesn’t work. Lipstick on a pig in a square hole. 
  * Object based drawing program (i.e. MacDraw, not MacPaint). Lots of Edison progress, I know hundreds of things that don’t work. (Anyone write one of these?)
  * An interesting DB and query language that had some novel temporal capabilities.

Currently fighting with a “spreadsheet engine”, though I’m teetering on the abyss of machine learning and might step off.

If it needs graphics or a GUI, it’s Java. If not I tend towards Common Lisp or Elisp.

stevefan1999• 3 years ago

In my eyes nothing is useless. Even the useless machine [1] is not so useless after all!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine

_benj• 3 years ago

I wrote a useless CHIP-8 emulator and it’s the most fun I’ve had in year with computers!

Not just that, but even though I didn’t know it (since I was having fun…) I was also learning!

The concepts, principles and techniques that I learned from that project are far from useless!

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

It doesn’t have to be useless. Scratching your own itch can be fun. Especially if you forgo “SaaSifying” it and just knock something up quickly that is rough and ready. You don’t need authn flows and price pages or even Tailwind components if it is just for you!

I find JS with few/no libraries and frameworks quite a good spot for fun web based projects. Make it a static site if possible. Use local storage. Amazing how productive you can be on the feature without the weight of all the backend and frontend boilerplate!

I also like Elm for such projects. It is a satisfying language to get stuff done in. I can’t explain why, just a personal thing.

slmjkdbtl2• 3 years ago

It's annoying to constantly face questions like "Why do you make this?" when it's always just "for fun!!"

ykonstant• 3 years ago

Stop having fun! ٩(╬ʘ益ʘ╬)۶

FridgeSeal• 3 years ago

I really agree with this take. I think the software and designs people stumble upon when they do things for fun and pure curiosity yield can yield interesting and thought-provoking stuff, that you wouldn’t have otherwise encountered when in “productivity” mode.

Do things to explore the design space, explore the most-unconventional idea, do something because it sounds hilarious, because who knows, you might just come up with something awesome, or your work/thoughts/failures/successes might inspire someone else and in turn they get the bump they need to solve some new problem! I don’t think this is limited to just “writing software” either, I suspect it applies basically everywhere.

lasagna_coder3• 3 years ago

yeah, imagine only creating software when you know it's useful by every measure.

marc_abonce• 3 years ago

The "useless" programming language that OP created is actually pretty interesting. It only uses exception throwing and catching as the only control flow and apparently that's enough to do pretty much anything.

I mean, obviously I'm never going to use it, but it was a fun read.

Hurl language: https://ntietz.com/blog/introducing-hurl/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393673

rottc0dd• 3 years ago

My man! It is definitely useful in while writing a deeply complex recursive code.

The procedure is kind of a walking two sub trees in parallel and making changes to existing subtrees while walking. But, if the recursive procedure fails we should revert the tree. And the code is recursive methods calling other recursive methods.

I once used such thing along with command pattern for remembering the code to be executed if the recursive procedure succeeds. And while doing that, if anything fails, we can just throw away the list of commands collected and execute it later if the whole recursive procedure succeeds.

The control flow was exactly this.

winddude4• 3 years ago

Well I'm winning than. I've written so much useless software, and projects, and starts of projects.

It's all fun and joy until you come back to it 1 or 1.5 years later, and resources are now throttled because they're so over used because of the explosion in AI. The fun seems to go away when you come back to an old project, and things have changed.

shnock• 3 years ago

What kinds of resources?

winddude4• 3 years ago

commoncrawl at the moment.

But also used to have some stuff using the old reddit (through pushshift) and twitter apis. Plus some old classified crawlers, where sites have taken a more proactive approach.

syndicatedjelly5• 3 years ago

It's all fun and joy until you come back to it 1 or 1.5 years later, and resources are now throttled because they're so over used because of the explosion in AI.

What does this mean?

winddude4• 3 years ago

No yesterday, I just tried to spin up an old project using common crawl, which is hosted on AWS open data, seems like it's gotten quite popular since I lasted worked on it, and they're experiencing throttling from over usage, maybe even ddos (or just a really bad developer).

But seems to be a pretty common thing with stuff related to data and crawling. Everyone is cracking down on crawlers, adding paywalls, removing previously free APIs, so coming back to old projects in that domain seems to be impossible.

byteknight• 3 years ago

One of the most impacted "sayings" I once heard that made me think like no other before it.

"Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Timed"

keernan• 3 years ago

I first learned about computers in 1970 when I took the only computer course my college offered: a one semester course of Fortran. In 1977 I passed the bar and became a trial attorney. In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. I spent lots of hours developing expertise in a courtroom over the ensuing 40+ years. But my love was playing with programming (mainly basic; dBase; FoxBase; FoxPro; VB; VBA).

I spent a huge percentage of my non-working life programming. I created a lot of software I implemented in my own firm, starting with a timekeeping/billing program in 1981 before computers existed in law firms. In many ways, my firm was my "home lab". It was what brought me joy.

I retired from law in 2019 and I now spend 100% of my free time learning c; bash; linux; networking; virtualization; with assembly, rust, lisp, and more on my agenda. And I do it for the same reason I always have: because playing with computers is a blast!

diimdeep2• 3 years ago

For individual play, exploration, and edification certainly do it, but sharing such software is careless. Consider keeping it to yourself, otherwise label it clearly for what it is: an experiment, a joke, or a personal challenge. Otherwise it clutter the ecosystem, divert newcomers from battle tested tools, poses security threats, deludes perception of quality by sending message that thoroughness and quality control aren't essential, diverts community to spent time on "useless" projects instead of addressing real-world challenges.

lasagna_coder3• 3 years ago

clutter the ecosystem what ecosystem? diverts community to spent time on "useless" projects what community? addressing real-world challenges. what challenges?

i'm curious to know what the criteria or thresholds are for releasing vs not releasing.

diimdeep2• 3 years ago

ecosystem of packages, libraries, gems, crates or what the fuck people calling this things these days.

community of programmers within different technology stacks.

challenges to make software simpler, smaller and faster, to maintain software and prevent modern bloat from eating up gigahz of cycles on many cores.

NoGravitas4• 3 years ago

Honestly, all those things sound cool and good. Anything that reduces the value of software to capital is great in my book.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 3 years ago

Or there's my take: release early, release often, release everything.

MichaelRo• 3 years ago

Let's play "devil's advocate" and ... advocate writing LESS "useless" software.

I'm not saying don't work on your own stuff, but if you're going to invest a significant amount of your life into something, ideally it should also have the potential to earn you some money. Unless you're already rich and your problem is boredom instead of money like for the 99.9% of us.

I'm doing just that. I have a long running project that I built for myself, which was tangentially useful in experimenting various software architecture designs but the key part in this project is that it's "business driven". So if I understood something it's the employer's focus on the business rather than the tendency of developers to get lost in the useless beauty of technicalities.

I seldom build a feature for the fun of it, mostly I just need the damn thing to work. And when I do build the feature, it's almost never the most bleeding-edge aggressive optimized version, it takes me weeks and months to think about an use-case so running getting results in 10 seconds versus 100 seconds is absolutely irrelevant, actually relevant if getting 10 seconds instead of 100 takes me another couple hours of thinking.

Recently I am dabbling with the idea of starting another personal side project and again, it's gonna be something of potential commercial value. No harm combining the pleasant with the useful, in fact being useful rather than useless is what keeps me going.

syndicatedjelly5• 3 years ago

if you're going to invest a significant amount of your life into something, ideally it should also have the potential to earn you some money.

This is a sad, sad way to live life

teddyh2• 3 years ago

This is a sad, sad way to live life

That’s just how living under capitalism is like for the people who aren’t the lucky few who have a great job doing something they like. If you want a world without the need to earn money, advocate for and implement UBI.

Until then, don’t disparage people trying to earn money.

Sohcahtoa822• 3 years ago

Indeed.

That person is going to end up being the type that will be lying on their death bed thinking "I wish I had allowed myself to have more fun."

sgtnoodle• 3 years ago

I dunno about the greater context of your snippet, but at face value it seems optimistic to me. It's a wonderful thing when many important axes of consideration are in alignment. Many people find happiness in feeling useful, and money is how a civilization abstracts usefulness into something fungible. It's certainly not a perfect abstraction, but it's not inherently good or bad either.

JaDogg2• 3 years ago

Have fun and learn when you need it, and work to earn when you need it. I see no harm in both.

But it might be better to have some fun in a while (it does not have to be writing code), so you do not feel like you are trapped in an endless rat-race (99.9% are in the rat-race). Having fun would also reduce the probability of burning out / going deep into depression.

gv83• 3 years ago

write all you want, but if your useless software has to be maintained by other people, think really hard about it. and write it properly. I had maintained way too many "don't lose the play factor!!111one" codebases at ${dailyjobs}.

liampulles2• 3 years ago

I think there is a balance: I try to write useless explorative software that has no expectations beyond learning in my spare time, and at work I try and focus my time on very pragmatic, focused, "useful" work.

Don't confuse exploratory learning code with production code, respect the boundary (IMO)

godshatter• 3 years ago

I agree with this, even with my own projects. When I write code I go for pretty code that is designed well for what it's doing and doesn't have much cruft. I refactor if the next thing I want to add doesn't match what I've built, and figuring out how to replace it in a minimal yet clear to read way is where I get my fun from, I've mostly figured out. I'm an organic designer and a code artist, I guess.

Having said that, when I step into territory that's new to me I'll write the worst code imaginable without the normal restraints just to get something that works, then spend a week painstakingly trying to figure out why each piece works and how it's supposed to work and refactoring it into a nice relatively clean design.

At work I will write an exploratory bit of code, through it away once it runs correctly, and rewrite it in the code it needs to live in afterwards.

liampulles2• 3 years ago

I agree with your approach - I think I did not write clearly enough, and I should say that when I say exploratory code in this context, I'm thinking about trying out new libraries, languages, etc. Certainly if one is on a new project or in a new domain, the code has to be exploratory at first.

franze• 3 years ago

some of my recent useless software with an audience of mostly 1 (me)

https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/

click the icon that matches the word (red word -> red icon, green word -> green icon, up word -> up icon, so easy)

http://lalo.li/lsd/ - LSD refactored and now in color

https://flapimoji.franzai.com/ - a flapy bird implementation in emojis

https://ashtanga-muskeln.franzai.com/ - a german yoga anatomy learning app and quizz

same for yoga vokabulary - https://ashtanga-vokabeln.franzai.com/

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/lighthouse-script - a bulk google lighthouse testing suit

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/thisismy - thats hard to explain, its a file and website text extracter minyfier copy to clipboard command line tool

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/qrpwd - backup encrypted data as qr images in your google photos / whatsapp / fb photo streams

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

I love writing useless software! Here's some useless software I wrote this year:

- https://lines.potato.horse → the uncolouring book

- https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io → MeatGPT

- https://tidings.potato.horse → Medieval Content Farm

- https://butter.sonnet.io → You deserve butter.

- https://mrr.sonnet.io → Mrr

- https://mrrr.sonnet.io → Mrr (physically accurate)

Some of those just very elaborate blog posts, over-engineered as I found it easier to express myself through playing with code, rather than solving a real problem.

Longer list (including some accidentally useful stuff): https://sonnet.io./projects

danielovichdk• 3 years ago

https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io most hilarious thing I have seen on the internet for a long time. Gold!

halffullbrain• 3 years ago

Marvellous. I asked it:

Which opinions do you tender?

and

Do you need a beefy GPU?

The result really was food for thought.

LoganDark2• 3 years ago

Woah, what are you using to render the brush strokes in The Uncoloring Book?

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

Rendering is done via SVG (and a bit buggy), the stroke thickness is calculated via perfect-freehand (by Steve Ruiz, the guy behind tldraw)

rollcat5• 3 years ago

My favorite useless thing: https://sc.rollc.at

Actually finally found a justifiable use case for infinite scroll

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

oh my god I was working on sth similar but with a never-ending cigarette. This is just perfect. (I struggled with quitting smoking, a lot.)

BeFlatXIII• 3 years ago

An alternative for the bandwidth-impaired and hippophiles: http://endless.horse

edisondotme• 3 years ago

This was underwhelming with Javascript disabled in my browser.

fjallstrom• 3 years ago

Just came here to say that I love this

jodrellblank3• 3 years ago

Your triple-r mrrr link doesn't seem to work, btw.

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

Arrrgh, thanks, here you go: https://mrrr.vercel.app

rpastuszak6• 3 years ago

Argh, I can't edit my comment – inspired by the article, I prepared my own list:

https://untested.sonnet.io/Here's+a+List+of+Toys

I actually forgot about a bunch of those

jmhammond• 3 years ago

I got inspired by your stuff (and other links on this post) that I ended up getting a Scratch account and made an analog clock https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/910890145

My 8 year old does scratch every day and I often help him when he has questions. I was pretty fun to just make a silly project (with unnecessary animation) for fun! Thanks for the inspiration!

And by the way, a catch phrase in our house is now "Hurry to love! Hurry to love!"

nicbou• 3 years ago

There is also an hybrid of work and play where you put way too much work into a marginally useful feature because it's fun.

I run a content website for a living. There are off-the-shelf tools for that.

6 years in, it runs on its own static site generator. It was a blast to build. I also spent a month or two writing a German tax calculator because there were no nice ones. Surprisingly, it became the most popular page on the website. Likewise, my citizen office's appointment finder garnered a lot of positive press.

If I were minmaxing this website as a job, it would be one long pitch for various products. Or perhaps an endless series of keyword-targeted posts.

Instead it's a playground for my ideas. These long detours on pleasant roads yielded a website that has some magic to it. It's a lot more to me than just a job.

BiteCode_dev3• 3 years ago

Learned that by coding with a friend I considered a terrible coder.

I worked with him on a lot of fun projects, because we get along well, and he really doesn't know what he is doing, copy / pasting all other the place, no archi, no design, bad naming... Half of the time he's not sure what the code is really doing.

And it works.

I noticed how in the end he accomplished more than I did. He didn't sweat the small stuff, he worked more, way more, as well. He didn't write unit tests, but he always tested everything manually again and again by playing with the result like a kid.

In the end I embraced the idea.

I wanted to code a contact software because all the ones I tried didn't do what I wanted. I didn't, I just used django-admin and called it a day instead of trying to craft some slick UI. I've been using that terrible stack of forms for 10 years, and it did the job.

I needed a cli for totp years before any existed, I just fired Python and dumped, in clear text, the seeds in TOML. Took me half a decade to add encryption to it, because symlinking the file from a veracrypt container was sufficient and required little work.

2 months ago I wanted a timer to top up a time budget when I do sport, and consume it when I play video games (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...). I just splatted a wall of tailwind regurgitated by chatgpt and pupetted by HTMX. Turns out it was just enough. I show that to my friends that were asking me wtf I was doing with this, and 4 people asked me an account, one a trial for doctors for addiction programs (!). Don't even have a register form, I hard coded them :)

Wish I told my young self to stop being so obsessed with doing things right or even working on important problems. I never managed to reach "right" in my entire life anyway.

eitland• 3 years ago

I noticed years ago that if I started by doing everyting correctly (naming my project etc) it would likely be doomed.

After I started letting my projects have the names my IDE assignes until they have proven themselves to be interesting my success rate seems to have increased.

I think this is related to the same underlying thing you describe.

justsomehnguy• 3 years ago

I'm in the process of writing a some small system which relies on MariaDB as a storage. The thing is what I don't want to use SQL connector on the endpoints, so I need some HTTP intrrface. I vaguely remembered what I did something like that some time ago, but decided to started fresh.

Well, fastforward to the last Monday, I'm a little stuck and it gets me wondering how I managed to solve it (if ever) the last time. A couple of searches later I found out what I wrote a 'proper' REST-like API wrapper, with OpenAPI, the proper HTTP response codes and whatever... just a year ago. Yet I spent so much time on it I didn't even used it anywhere and subsequently forgot about it.

ess3• 3 years ago

I’ve found the opposite work for me. Finding silly pun names early greatly improves the chances of me finishing it.

mrweasel• 3 years ago

You can always just hammer software together and just clean it up later, when you know what you want/need.

There's some weird logic in cleaning up code, especially that of others. You curse and wonder what the hell they where thinking, but on the other hand, they got the thing of the ground so...

amatecha• 3 years ago

I'm doing this right now, writing the dumbest, unmaintainable crap, because I don't know what I'm doing (writing a fun "useless" app with tech I know very little about), but yeah.. it's working! It's productive, even if grueling. and I'm learning a lot in the process. Fun stuff :) Luckily I do know how to clean it up later and refine it (and make it more maintainable/extensible), but I'll do that when I actually have something working. I can definitely support this approach as it's been very productive for me in the past, too (especially when trying new stuff).

barrysteve• 3 years ago

That physically hurts to read.

It is why there is nothing new on the web and what's here today will be roughly the same as what's here in 50 years time.

There should be one programming stack that does work and you can understand it completely without going to MIT or getting blindsided by vendors and it sticks around for decades and you don't have to get stuck in boilerplate, or learn-the-hard-way how a bubble sort works, or how a data structure should be designed, or how an algorithm should be crafted.

BiteCode_dev3• 3 years ago

Lol.

Yeah, and humanity should speak the same language everywhere. Also, we have enough food for everybody, why are some people starving?

Welcome to reality.

acuozzo• 3 years ago

This has existed for years. The programming language is called Employee and it comes stock with a natural language compiler.

Fred Brooks wrote a good book on how to hook several Employee installations together to act as a distributed code generation system.

Unfortunately, use of Employee isn't free, but if you have a PhD and work in academia you can get access to installations of Graduate Student.

monooso• 3 years ago

This assumes that your ideal tech stack is the same as my ideal tech stack. It also assumes that every project has the same technical challenges and requirements. Neither of those things is true.

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

Same; one guy that kind of inspired me back in the day was a complete dick, and when I saw his code later on it was awful.

But, he also made $100 / hour living in a low wage country (east bloc / former soviet). He'd buy a domain and its content, redo the software, do some SEO and the like, then sell it for 10x what he paid for it in like 3 months. ~$7000 profit for three months of work is not bad, and I doubt it was fulltime.

sanderjd3• 3 years ago

It's funny, I have had similar experiences, with a totally different conclusion. I've worked with people who just throw shit at the wall like that, and like you, I've seen the shit stick to the wall often times. But my conclusions have been something like: 1. It doesn't work out just as often as it does, and it's impossible to predict which situation is which, and harder to fix post-facto than it would have been to just not do it that way from the start, so (IMO) it's a crapshoot with negative expected value, 2. I hate working this way, at a personal level, which leads to: 3. I just don't want to spend my time working on stuff where this is even plausibly the right approach.

All in all, this was one of the formative experiences that has led me to seeking out deeper and larger projects to spend my time on, rather than the string of smaller more trivial things that lend themselves to this approach to software. But the other side of that coin is that I'm a lot more content now with the understanding that other people just have different preferences than me. I spend a lot less time thinking about what the right way to build software is, and more time thinking about what's right for me.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

I rather came to a different conclusion yesterday: I want to write less, but more beautiful code. Simple, elegant and powerful. And getting the job done. I am kind of sick of useless boilerplate, wrapper, workaround, ductaping ...

The magic feeling when something simple and elegant works faster and better then the hacky mess, this is to me the magic of programming. Not writing useless software for the sake of it. It is fine if most side projects don't go anywhere, but I think I rather wrote too much useless code in my life, which was draining and for me keeping the sparks fly was achieved very strongly yesterday, with simple, elegant and useful code. A work of art I am proud of. I want to do more of that.

And when I am done coding, I rather go outside and do something else.

rockbruno• 3 years ago

The fact that everything needs to have a "purpose" (not just with tech, but with life in general) is something I continuously struggle with. I know I'm not supposed to care about it but I have a really hard time applying it in practice.

derelicta2• 3 years ago

Next useless project: a program that mimicks some "schizo"-memes about CIA-Mind control. Goal is to somehow make it look like the one in the memes, publish it somewhere and see how many folks actively launch that piece of software. Will probably integrate some basic facial recognition like OpenFace n something.

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

Why software when you could also make it a creative outing for yourself?

derelicta2• 3 years ago

It's a creative outing for myself. But dw, when I leave work, I tend to avoid getting in front of my computer as soon as I'm home ahah. Jogging remains my first love, even tho I'm not really good at it.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Useless and also "non-profitable".

Here on HN I feel like there is some pressure to make money, and on a lot of comment threads there is always someone who pops up to mention their little side project they started for the lolz that now makes them 100k/month in passive income or whatever.

We need to give ourselves a break and do things for fun.with no expectations that anyone else will ever even see it not care!

mortallywounded2• 3 years ago

I think it's great to engage with your muse. See what happens and learn something along the way. You don't need to "release" this software on the world.

With that being said, it's your personal site and anything goes. If it's complete enough to be useful/educational/usable then by all means release it.

I hesitate to release anything too early because the internet is full of half-complete projects (devblogs for X game that never make it past episode 2, yet another todo app, a create react app with one commit, "template projects").

alhadrad• 3 years ago

- https://github.com/akoerner/8ball → bash magic 8 ball that pulls the good entropy from random.org

- https://github.com/akoerner/buzzword_bingo → Generate buzzword bingo cards for all of your meetings

- https://github.com/akoerner/cdbuff → Grandpa's memory pills for the 'cd' command

brainlessdev• 3 years ago

I made a fortune database from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. You can go "fortune /path/to/meditations" and get a random paragraph from the book. But you need to build it first.

https://github.com/fnune/meditations-fortune

incomingpain• 3 years ago

Woot, I'm doing this right!

This week's project has been a django app for my house which doesn't seem to do anything useful yet?

requests -> beautifulsoup -> to track website changes? Changes every time! Ugh.

Weather forecast stuff but again useless because forecasts are terrible.

notakio2• 3 years ago

The article contains solid advice that certainly transcends coding, alone; in my free time, I try to essentially "find work". Sometimes that work consists of writing software to solve weird little home "problems" that may or may not be actual problems. Sometimes that means building something as a joke, just for fun. Sometimes that work consists of over-engineering a water heater box-turned-space shuttle for my daughter. Or recording my dog's wheezing and turning it into "classic industrial" music. It all feeds the same internal need, though; to learn, to build, and to produce something, rather than to passively consume other people's products. It keeps my brain alive, and I find improved performance/innovation in other work-related projects, as a result of just staying active, mentally.

Sohcahtoa822• 3 years ago

Curious if you've tried any "work" games. Factory building games (Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, Captain of Industry, etc.), programming games (Human Resource Machine, 7 Billion Humans, anything by Zacktronics), or colony sims (Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Banished)?

notakio2• 3 years ago

I have not. I'm afraid I am a gaming luddite, though for no particular reason other than having a lengthy list of mental "to-dos" in front of it.

PredictorX1• 3 years ago

This is a great way to exercise programming skills in preparation for "more serious" projects.

NoGravitas4• 3 years ago

What a way to take all the fun out of it.

francisofascii• 3 years ago

When you spend all day working on useful things, doing the work, it's easy for that spark of joy to go out.

Ha. My day job is where I write useless software. My side projects are actually the useful stuff. (only half joking)

chankstein38• 3 years ago

This is what keeps me saying I love programming. I do it professionally as well but am burnt out and tired of the job. However, in my free time, I still fall down obsessive rabbit holes writing weird little apps that modify an image in a unique way or a wave file or modding one of my favorite games.

A lot of times I don't have the energy for it since I spend all day doing it but I got into development because I wanted the freedom to make my computer do whatever I wanted not for the cash. I taught myself as a child, well before I even cared about making money. I just wish there was something else as lucrative. I'd love to switch careers but I'm not willing to give up the income.

Lukeisun• 3 years ago

How do you guys get ideas for “useless” software? I’d like to do some more personal projects but I always get stuck at what I want to even do

NoGravitas4• 3 years ago

Everything I write outside of work hours is specifically useless, if only to keep my work from being used by the enshittification company or the MIC. Yeah, my software is Open Source, have fun trying to find a way to monetize a gopher-to-gemini proxy.

wwader• 3 years ago

Some joke/useless software i've written:

- https://github.com/wader/jqjq

- https://github.com/wader/flac.tcl

In most cases i learned way more then i expected. Even made some friends.

brennaw1• 3 years ago

Why craft when you can play? Great to see a refreshing perspective amidst the hustle and grind of the tech world. Next time someone asks why I spent my weekend making a digital potato, I'll just link them to this article. On a side note, there's a secret brilliance in 'useless' software: it reveals the pure essence of the coder's joy and curiosity.

temporallobe• 3 years ago

I have quite a few of my own personal projects (apps, scripts, utilities, etc.), and I would say most of these would probably be useless to anyone but me, but it’s fun and satisfying to create, especially in a cold corporate/enterprise environment where all the joy is sucked out of software development.

JaDogg2• 3 years ago

Anyone know if there is something like `The Recurse Center` in London ? would be cool to join something like this. :)

lsferreira42• 3 years ago

I do a lot uf useless and experiment software, like these:

https://namechecker.leandrosf.com/ -> Check if your pretended project name is already used in somewhere

https://github.com/lsferreira42/bli -> a brainfuck interpreter that is intended to help you understand brainfuck

https://github.com/lsferreira42/nadb -> a threaded key value store with memory buffering

https://github.com/lsferreira42/hnpes -> a hackernews chrome extension to find previous posts of the url your are browsing

All of them work, but not at all usefull hahahaha

Write more "useless" software

Related Stories