Noah Pauls

It strikes me as odd that a personal project could be anything besides play, but I've experienced it myself. It's easy to get mired down in the idea that as a professional software developer (whatever that means), all my code has to be professional: it should be applicable, robust, and demonstrate best practices.

But what about programming "sparks joy" for me? Sometimes, it is the usefulness and robustness of a simple idea, or the beauty of well-written, thoroughly tested code. But most of the time, the joy just comes from making the computer go vroom in a curious way.

It's fun to free your mind from the burdens of "professional" requirements:

Writing useless software is a great way to free yourself from those obligations. If you write something just to play, you define what it is you want out of the project. You can stop any time, and do no more or less than you're interested in. Don't want to write tests? Skip them. Don't want to use an issue tracker? Ditch it. Finished learning what you wanted to? Stop the project if it's not fun anymore!

Fredom from obligations is largely what made my Quacker News project so enjoyable. The only obligation is to build something cool and have fun doing it.