Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

• love

  258 4,341 9.6 C++

  LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.

  

Find a side project. Something not involving web stacks and Javascript. I recommend one of these platforms, which trade off complexity for power to varying degrees:

* https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

* https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

* https://love2d.org (shameless plug: http://akkartik.name/post/roundup22)

I never work with raw pixels at my day job, and it's been enormously satisfying to take control of a whole app and build things nobody else will ever build.

• wordsandbuttons

  12 474 8.4 HTML

  A growing collection of interactive tutorials, demos, and quizzes about maths, algorithms, and programming.

You can write in JavaScript without any frameworks and libs. The language itself is pretty self-sufficient.

5 years ago I started https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons to focus on interactive writing. Just text and JavaScript to make interactive illustrations. There are no dependencies in principle. Nor external, neither external. Only text and code. Tons of fun, no red tape.

You might think that this works for small projects only. Well, there are more than 50 interactive pages now (would have been more, but I spent 1.5 years writing a book), and things haven't started to fall apart yet.

I strongly advice vanilla programming for hobby. JavaScript or not.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• TIC-80

  134 4,744 9.2 C

  TIC-80 is a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.

If you're _totally_ new to game programming (like me), I found tic80 [0] or pico8 [1] (I think the latter is more popular) a really nice introduction to game programming. They are simulated "fantasy consoles" that come with a whole wack constraints, so you're somewhat limited in what you can build, but it leaves a lot of room to grok core concepts that you could then take over to Unity or Unreal or the like.

There is a third one too, I can't remember what it's called though. I think it has "Love" in the name.

[0] https://tic80.com/

[1] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

• Godot

  2,744 82,940 10.0 C++

  Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

  

I found Godot[1] to be a nice, mostly consistent and cohesive gaming engine and editor. It has a Python-like native scripting language, and the whole thing feels much more approachable compared to Unreal and Unity.

1. https://godotengine.org/

• hn-search

  1,618 524 2.9 TypeScript

  Hacker News Search

  

There is nobody else who could have written good code, except developers. There is nobody else who kept rewriting X-Screensaver insecurely for 17 years[1] except developers. Nobody else who has knowledge or experience to standardise on tools for the greater good. There is nobody else who wrote Jira but developers. There is nobody else who only wants to do Electron, or who refuses things like UAC because security is fine on their OpenBSD ThinkPad.

Reddit blames capitalism, HN blames managmenent, 4chan blames 'Pajeet' Indian stereotype, Slashdot blames Microsoft, very few developers take a look in the mirror and say things like "we need less powerful languages"[2] or "ignore the firehose of new technologies"[3] or "If I want to ship my software, as opposed to just write it, I need to use tech that's a couple of clicks back from "bleeding edge," and spend a lot of time, "polishing the fenders. B O R I N G [but I do it]"[4].

Civil engineers have legal duties and responsibilities to make sure the things they build are fit for purpose and sign off on them before they get deployed, and can be personally fined or imprisoned or lose licenses if they weren't fit for purpose.

Want to make a text editor at home? Knock yourself out, pick any language you want, dabble all you like. Want to make something that handles millions of people's data, sign your name to it and put your professional reputation on the line before every release. And it may well make salaries go up for the people willing and able to do that. The world runs on a lot more code than buildings these days and professional developers complaining that all the software we all suffer under is shitty, is like civil engineers complaining that buildings fall down and it's all management's fault for demanding blueprints before construction and inspections during construction to try and stop the company buildings falling down so often, ugh all that red tape, can't we still use wattle and daub it works fine on my garden shed.

[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/

[2] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/

[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

• TinyGo

  95 14,479 9.3 Go

  Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM.

  

You probably know about this, but it might be worth trying TinyGo[0] for WASM, given that WASM is basically an embedded environment.

0: https://tinygo.org/

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