A Hobby Coding Biography

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/97_projects/

by asicsp • 3 years ago

70 8 3 years ago

This was written largely as a result of the "challenging problems" thread that made the rounds a while back[1]. Not really suggesting anyone copies these projects, more of a "well actually, what problems have I tackled?"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768678

MichaelAza• 3 years ago

Very interesting. If I try to think back, my first hobby project must have been in 10th grade. At that point I very well nearly memorized the C# part of the MSDN, as well as CLR via C# and some other programmimg books (maybe GoF?) but haven't actually written any code that does anything useful. In 10th grade everyone in our class was doing some sort of ASP.NET project for school and a lot of the other students were having trouble with the data layer and SQL stuff, so I decided to code up an ORM (a thing I knew existed, but haven't actually used) and later a utility library for exposing REST APIs which were both used by most of my classmates. It was a fun project. Later projects included a script that tells you where to live based on your public transit needs, a wordle clone for the original GameBoy, and probably other even less useful stuff.

golly_ned• 3 years ago

Wow, from this comment alone I can tell you were much further ahead and smarter than your peers in terms of your ability to understand concepts and abstract, while your peers were struggling on such simple things. I can tell you were a highly intelligent child. Bravo, very impressive!

mikewarot• 3 years ago

It wasn't a hobby project, but I wrote a non-preemptive multitasker / co-routine library for Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS back in the 1990s.

I wrote a Forth in Assembler for OS/2 that somehow found an audience in Germany, Forth/2. I was told that you couldn't write programs in Assembler for OS/2, so I had to prove otherwise. 9-)

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

I was told that you couldn't write programs in Assembler for OS/2, so I had to prove otherwise. 9-)

A surprising amount of interesting software was written to prove a point :P

bombcar• 3 years ago

The number of people who think you can't call advanced OS functions from assembly is ... way too high.

demizer• 3 years ago

My first hobby project was a yo momma joke spammer for AoL in Visual Basic 3.0. Forgive me I was only 14. The VB chatroom on AOL was my teacher.

Scubabear68• 3 years ago

My first hobby project was a BASIC program to track my AD&D character stats on my Timex Sinclair 1000.

A Hobby Coding Biography

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