The advice to work on your own "shed" has really helped with my burnout during this AI age. I got into technology because I liked coding, building, and tinkering with systems. LLMs are great at coding and getting basic pipelines built, and I found myself with more pressures to be agent-first rather than hands on key-board at work. My side projects at home are where I've been able to find the joy for coding again.
I recently wrote a small service to get a temperature LED panel on my computer case working. It required a proprietary program to pipe the sensor temps to the display, which only worked on Windows. Being on Linux (arch btw :P), there wouldn't be a way to get this to work. I had a lot of fun learning about how to reverse engineer the inputs/outputs the other software was doing and replicate it in Python.
This post really resonated with me. Through the daily drudgery, I lost that spark that drove me to programming in the first place as a kid and became disgruntled with it for a while. It wasn't until I pushed myself to get back to hobby (or shed) programming that I rekindled my old passion and, as a result, find my day job much more bearable.
I have an actual shed that I spend time in, doing maintenance work, building physical items (latest one is an auto-refilling bird watering station), and making beer. Given my day job is so desk-bound, and so tech oriented, I find using my hands in my off-time to be very fulfilling and what keeps me sane.
I had to get out of tech for that reason: i need a physical good I can create and hold. Using my engineer skills to build physical things satiates my brain so much more. I don't think I can ever go back to coding as a job. I just don't care about other people's garbage code, lol.
i got out of tech/coding so i could apply my skills to more real world stuff. it's been so much better. i don't make as much but i end each day with a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. i wouldn't trade it away. my social life has gotten so much better, as well, because i'm happier in general and i talk to so many more people as a result. i smile more, i think is the main thing.
Surely step one is psychological. I feel like being able to accept a lower paycheck is critical to leaving tech if you’re at the over specialized part of your career
Callous, but that’s your fault for building a life that requires tech money to maintain. I don’t get the point of comments like yours, just to make one feel bad for escaping the golden handcuffs.
There are plenty of people that have children and live decent lives earning less than $200k/year + benefits.
Same here. I've been trying to get more into the physical world, with a tech angle, rather than just pure software. As you said, using my hands is what keeps me sane, makes the world seem a little more real, if that makes sense?
The shed is where you take the blueprints you learned on the job and actually get to play with them.
> You try something in the shed on a weekend because you’re curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the documentation doesn’t tell you. Then months later, when the team at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you’re not starting from zero.
These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.
Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do something useful.
My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of my own.
I have a shed, and I agree with the broad thrust of the argument.
During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that had the emotional stick of a bad workplace.
Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.
I just do other things now.
Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).
It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.
Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it’s tedious, I’ll drag me feet a while, but eventually it’ll be done. It’s just work.
> That’s taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and applying it to a space where I had total freedom.
Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time.
Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring corporate crap.
I don't known how all of you "homelab" people put up with it. I have enough Linux boxes at work that demand too much care and feeding.
The author has a good point but it really isn't a two-way street. The hobby stuff can feed into your career, but letting it go the other way is usually either counterproductive, or bad for your mental health.
Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.
Tinker in your shed because it makes you happy, and brings joy and meaning to your life. You'll be more productive and, in my experience, you'll actually be more likely to learn something useful for work.
I’m retired (not really by choice), and spend huge amounts of time, coding. I’ve written over 20 shipped apps (many have been deprecated and retired, though); mostly since retiring.
I’ve had to drastically reduce the scope of my work, but not the Quality. Working alone, means smaller goals.
LLMs are a game-changer, here. They are helping me to re-expand my scope. I’m not where I was, while getting paid, but I’m getting a lot done.
OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home.
For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.
I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot of fun and the side projects gave me energy.
Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.
I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've actually done.
Is there a place where people can document and share the things they are tinkering with in the shed?
I had this idea where people's inventions/devices could be sent around in a "pay-it-forward circle" for learning and inspiration. People already do that with crystals.
Also, can being aware that x number of people are working on the same thing yield to development in the state-of-the-art if they start working together?
I suppose there's always that tension between DIY'ers bouncing ideas off each other vs prototypes built in fitted-out research labs to think about.
Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-reddit or using existing teamwork software?
If you had something to share, how would you choose it amongst the 10's or 100's of things you have already built? Maybe you'd need commercialization help? Are there liabilities and risks in sharing DIY devices?
I've been thinking about https://openhardware.directory/ and https://ohwr.org/ - maybe if you list your projects, agents can do the work of bringing people together and finding new ways to develop them. It's about value-adding on top of decentralized and disjointed projects. An easy way to construct plans or follow them? How to minimize duplicated work across the world?
Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (http://ucp.dev) but for scientists?
Everytime I go back and look at some of my older projects, I am in awe of how much I had done in the short while when I was working on it. Side Projects are kind of the only real way I think one can learn software engineering. Great read
My personal projects are the only think keeping me sane on this Brave New World of AI coding and the fact that we, AI skeptics, are all stuck in a prisoner dillema we're so acutely aware of, we find no other way than being the fearless pioneers of all that shit.
I still have lots of reservations against AI generated code, even wrote a couple articles about them that I never published, but decided that fighting against the flow and the mania is useless.
But, I don't want my kids to have student debt, so, I will just smile and nod along during the day, being even an enthusiastic leader of AI initiatives, taking care not to be the cassandra that asks where are the evaluation harness, the safeguards, as this is frequently frowned upon by the people who gets enamorated with a demo and wants to promete it to production yesterday. The people who believe that if you just spit a bunch of csvs for an LLM it will work like a contraint solver.
My personal projects bring me the crafstman satisfaction I increasingly can't find on my day job.
I don't have a skyscraper job, or even a low-rise, but I appreciate this article nonetheless as someone who has been self-learning how to turn a rickety shed project into perhaps a sturdy low-mid rise.
I've gone down endless lengthy detours that often lead to dead ends, but I've learned an immense amount from the OS to CSS. It's finally coming together in a simpler way than I had previously envisioned. Hopefully this year it'll be ready.
The big problem starts when your job contract limits what you can do with your intellectual property. Then you can have. your shed, but you can't show it to anyone, you can't invite friends, you can't use to plan your future business etc.
I love this point, but also it seems to me that "not understanding the difference between a skyscraper and a shed" is perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking and talking about software development in general.
Like, "is vibecoding good or bad?"
Depends! Probably fine for a shed and terrible for a skyscraper. Or maybe there are some things within the skyscraper that might be vibecodable? I don't know.
Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too, brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh. Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to development of my shed.
This post make me feel that working on your own projects is not a waste of time. It helps you more than you realize. Either by bringing you joy or experience, just keep working on your "shed" if you enjoy that.
Really good read. I think you really opened eyes here for myself and others. Different fields, different paths but all so impactful. Exactly the kind of perspective that helps you reset and get back on track.
Building a shed gives you a comprehensive understanding of the whole setup, which helps with building up a better mental model and intuition for the construction of a skyscraper. Otherwise it's easy to get lost with following standard procedures in building a skyscraper without understanding why certain things are done a certain way.
84 comments
I recently wrote a small service to get a temperature LED panel on my computer case working. It required a proprietary program to pipe the sensor temps to the display, which only worked on Windows. Being on Linux (arch btw :P), there wouldn't be a way to get this to work. I had a lot of fun learning about how to reverse engineer the inputs/outputs the other software was doing and replicate it in Python.
I have an actual shed that I spend time in, doing maintenance work, building physical items (latest one is an auto-refilling bird watering station), and making beer. Given my day job is so desk-bound, and so tech oriented, I find using my hands in my off-time to be very fulfilling and what keeps me sane.
Different strokes, as they say.
i got out of tech/coding so i could apply my skills to more real world stuff. it's been so much better. i don't make as much but i end each day with a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. i wouldn't trade it away. my social life has gotten so much better, as well, because i'm happier in general and i talk to so many more people as a result. i smile more, i think is the main thing.
There are plenty of people that have children and live decent lives earning less than $200k/year + benefits.
Sorry for making you feel bad.
>
The shed is where you take the blueprints you learned on the job and actually get to play with them.> You try something in the shed on a weekend because you’re curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the documentation doesn’t tell you. Then months later, when the team at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you’re not starting from zero.
These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.
Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do something useful.
My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of my own.
No worries if this is a bit too forward. It just seems fun to brainstorm about a dream like this and we may have some complementary experiences.
During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that had the emotional stick of a bad workplace.
However. I have mostly overcome that now. If you want to see how I built it: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/
my most recent "finished" project is this: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/despatchbox-pro/ which doesn't contain any electronics. This is unusual for me.
The projects I am most proud of are:
https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c... Which is a clock using a tuning fork
and https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-machin... which is a facsimile of a stock ticker
Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.
I just do other things now.
Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).
It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.
Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it’s tedious, I’ll drag me feet a while, but eventually it’ll be done. It’s just work.
> That’s taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and applying it to a space where I had total freedom.
Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time.
Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring corporate crap.
I don't known how all of you "homelab" people put up with it. I have enough Linux boxes at work that demand too much care and feeding.
The author has a good point but it really isn't a two-way street. The hobby stuff can feed into your career, but letting it go the other way is usually either counterproductive, or bad for your mental health.
Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.
Tinker in your shed because it makes you happy, and brings joy and meaning to your life. You'll be more productive and, in my experience, you'll actually be more likely to learn something useful for work.
I’ve had to drastically reduce the scope of my work, but not the Quality. Working alone, means smaller goals.
LLMs are a game-changer, here. They are helping me to re-expand my scope. I’m not where I was, while getting paid, but I’m getting a lot done.
For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.
Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.
I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've actually done.
I had this idea where people's inventions/devices could be sent around in a "pay-it-forward circle" for learning and inspiration. People already do that with crystals.
Also, can being aware that x number of people are working on the same thing yield to development in the state-of-the-art if they start working together?
I suppose there's always that tension between DIY'ers bouncing ideas off each other vs prototypes built in fitted-out research labs to think about.
Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-reddit or using existing teamwork software?
If you had something to share, how would you choose it amongst the 10's or 100's of things you have already built? Maybe you'd need commercialization help? Are there liabilities and risks in sharing DIY devices?
I've been thinking about https://openhardware.directory/ and https://ohwr.org/ - maybe if you list your projects, agents can do the work of bringing people together and finding new ways to develop them. It's about value-adding on top of decentralized and disjointed projects. An easy way to construct plans or follow them? How to minimize duplicated work across the world?
Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (http://ucp.dev) but for scientists?
No more coding after 5pm!
I still have lots of reservations against AI generated code, even wrote a couple articles about them that I never published, but decided that fighting against the flow and the mania is useless.
But, I don't want my kids to have student debt, so, I will just smile and nod along during the day, being even an enthusiastic leader of AI initiatives, taking care not to be the cassandra that asks where are the evaluation harness, the safeguards, as this is frequently frowned upon by the people who gets enamorated with a demo and wants to promete it to production yesterday. The people who believe that if you just spit a bunch of csvs for an LLM it will work like a contraint solver.
My personal projects bring me the crafstman satisfaction I increasingly can't find on my day job.
I've gone down endless lengthy detours that often lead to dead ends, but I've learned an immense amount from the OS to CSS. It's finally coming together in a simpler way than I had previously envisioned. Hopefully this year it'll be ready.
Like, "is vibecoding good or bad?"
Depends! Probably fine for a shed and terrible for a skyscraper. Or maybe there are some things within the skyscraper that might be vibecodable? I don't know.
> No blueprints, no permits, no audits.
Where I live, permits are required for all sheds, and for those above a certain size you have to submit blueprints.