
Ask HN: What are the most fun areas of programming? - that_thing
I&#x27;m not satisfied with the challenge, mission, technologies, or quality of the projects I&#x27;ve done web development for.  Are there more interesting, impactful, challenging, lighthearted, or otherwise more satisfying areas of programming?
======
bitwize
I dunno, man. What do you enjoy?

Pick a project to work on in your free time. A game, an audio synthesizer, a
web application, maybe a character or world generator for a tabletop game you
enjoy.

Work on it for however small a timeslice you want, while still working on it.
Half an hour every weekend, I don't know. Who cares. Just spend that little
bit of time solving a problem you care about and see if your enjoyment of
programming improves.

I like to write games. From scratch. Well, I use libraries or platforms to do
things like load bitmaps and draw to the display, but I don't use Unity,
Unreal, or one of those. It's relaxing. I can do things like REFACTOR THE
WHOLE DAMN CODEBASE if I want to without stepping on any toes. There's no
JIRA, no standups, no coworkers looking at me funny because I use Emacs for
all the things, no BAs or PMs telling me "that's out of scope for this sprint
--no wait, it must be finished by sprint's end" two days before the sprint
ends (actually happened once on the job). There's just me, my goals, and the
code.

But that's _my_ jam, yo. You need to find the problems _you_ enjoy solving,
then solve them your own way on your own time.

------
justfor1comment
Game development is super fun. Especially if you make one for android or ios
and let your friends play it on their phones. Feels very rewarding. It's also
quite challenging to get the feel of a game right. So there is lot's to learn
as a programmer.

------
chrisparton1991
I wasn't feeling fulfilled by my work either, so I started working on a side
project to scratch my creative itch.

Over the last few years I've been building a sequencer
([https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled](https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled))
that synchronises LEDs to music. I love both the artistic and architectural
challenges it presents.

In my day job, I love it when I can add tests to existing code or refactor
code to be more readable/maintainable/performant. I'm currently working as a
contract software engineer, so I get to move between projects quite a bit, and
I find that helps to keep things interesting.

------
northwest65
I would encourage everyone to give an Arduino a go. You can pick them up for a
few bucks each, and even kits full of sensors and hookup wires are quite
cheap. The range of micros available now is huge, and many of them have useful
stuff like built in WiFi (like an ESP8266). You need very little electronics
knowledge to do a whole heap of fun things, and tutorials and libraries are
absolutely everywhere.

~~~
kusha
In the world of $5 Raspberry PI Zero Ws with BT/Wifi/Full Distro why even
consider Arduino anymore?

~~~
chrisparton1991
You can get an Arduino Nano clone for considerably less than $5 on eBay. The
cheapest price I can find a local Pi Zero for on eBay is $24 AUD (without an
SD card).

I use Arduinos and similar boards to drive addressable LED strips. A lot of
these strips require extremely precise timing, which is difficult or
impossible to get from a Pi for some strips.

From another perspective, the limitations of the Arduino boards (e.g. RAM
measured in kilobytes) force you to think harder about how you want to solve a
problem, which can be quite an enjoyable challenge.

------
andrewf
"challenge, mission, technologies, or quality"

It's difficult to optimize this many different things at once. Odds are, when
you have multiple opportunities, no single opportunity will be the best in
each category. I care about "interesting/challenging" (I find challenging
things interesting :P) and "impactful" and picking between the two can be a
source of stress for me.

Getting a bit more meta, are you task-oriented, goal-oriented, people-
oriented? What truly makes 40 hours a week more pleasant for you?

To actually answer your question, I enjoy performance engineering (impact:
$$$) and distributed systems engineering / SRE (impact: availability, and the
headcount you need to run the system). So I enjoy working on a large video
platform. Large cloud providers in general seem like a fit.

Alternatively, to get the same kicks, I'd consider scientific computing (it
has the same economics, it's worth doing clever technical things to save $$$),
or embedded/gamedev (where you want to do as much as you can within limited
constraints)

~~~
matfil
_Getting a bit more meta, are you task-oriented, goal-oriented, people-
oriented? What truly makes 40 hours a week more pleasant for you?_

This question really resonated. Do you have any advice to someone who's pretty
strongly down the "goal-oriented" end of this? Fundamentally, I enjoy the
work, but do find a queue of 20 JIRA tickets (which I imagine to be the the
"task-oriented" way) drastically less appetising than a few meaty problems to
dig into.

------
codesushi42
I can definitely relate. I was a web developer for years before transitioning
to Android and iOS development, which was way more challenging and rewarding.
I gradually shifted away from UI altogether and focused on mobile
infrastructure. And nowadays I have shifted away from that and work on ML. So
anything is possible.

Get out of web dev and frontend at all costs. I have found every other area
programming much more fulfilling and challenging. Including embedded and game
programming, which I'll do outside of work. Web dev is just too high level and
too basic. There are way more interesting problems out there than mangling CSS
to do what you want.

Re: lighthearted. Procedural programming for games. Mazes, cellular automata,
terrain etc. This book is a good place to start:
[https://pragprog.com/book/jbmaze/mazes-for-
programmers](https://pragprog.com/book/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers)

~~~
thiht
> Get out of web dev and frontend at all costs.

Or don't. Frontend dev is the most fun I have while programming because I feel
it's more rewarding.

Just try everything and see what you like. Don't listen to people telling you
not to try new things.

~~~
codesushi42
OP is already doing frontend work and has grown tired of it.

------
7373737373
Creating new programming languages! Maybe just for fun, as in
[https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page) \-
or to find the syntax & semantics combinations that best match your intuition
and preferences.

------
dasmoth
Definitely try some different things and see what you like, but if you're
looking for mission and impact I wouldn't _completely_ dismiss web
development. The web browser is a stupendously powerful tool for "getting
things in front of people", and the combination of that plus some
understanding of another area can achieve a lot. There could be opportunities
to branch into scientific computing, fairly complex distributed systems, and
more. Pretty much every area of computing except _maybe_ hard-core embedded
systems have a web component nowadays (and the "softer" end of the embedded
market could have some good opportunities... can you imagine a consumer router
with an actually-nice management interface? That's primarily a web-development
problem!)

------
muzani
It's more about how you do it, not what you do.

Csikszentmihalyi brought up that flow happens when you work on something
difficult but have the skill level for it.

Typical flow activities are mountain climbing and motorcycle riding.

Two of the symptoms of flow is losing yourself and losing track of time. This
happens when you do something difficult enough that you can't focus on
anything else. All other input is turned off, it's just you and the problem.
With extreme sports, losing focus means death or injury. With programming it's
not automatic to forget everything and just code.

But a condition of flow is that you have to do it for its own sake. Not for
money, recognition, or even to help someone. These can be side effects but not
the main focus. You program for the sake of programming itself.

You can probably even get this kind of buzz from doing Hackerrank, but any
side project will do.

------
andredublin
Digital signal processing [http://dspguide.com](http://dspguide.com)

------
acutesoftware
I think programming is fun, but yes doing a lot of corporate projects for a
long time can get tiresome.

Try going for lighthearted - automate a silly thing for yourself. Something to
make your life 0.002% easier. Sure the cost benefit is not going to make you
rich, but doing something for yourself is quite different and can be a bit of
fun.

My best silly program is called 'heater' \- I was coding a lot at night and in
winter it was pretty cold. Heater was simply a loop with a lot of maths
calculations on repeat which increased the load on the (high end at the time)
PC. It had a nice little gui which allowed you to set the temp you wanted.

------
drakonka
The things I find really fun are things that my coworkers have expressed seem
tedious to them. For example, I work in a very large code base, and I enjoy
various refactoring and integration tasks. It forces me to debug and learn the
code, and at the same time when you get a nice engine upgrade from the dev
line in for a certain package/module/whatever it feels like an accomplishment
which will make our life easier in the future. I like various other cleanup
and test related tasks for largely the same reason - feels like you're
improving stuff for the long term.

------
ArtWomb
Have only played it twice over Xmas. But there was much about Beat Saber that
really stuck in my mind. If nothing else, it certainly sets the heart racing
and adrenaline pumping. But more than that, it feels like the delivery on a
promised future. Immersive and entertaining for both player and spectator.
Combines a potent admixture of LAN party play and physicality. And will
certainly inspire the next wave of arcade oriented VR gamedev ;)

------
mortivore
What have you worked on?

The healthcare sector can be impactful, but not particularly challenging. I
personally find anything working with an assembly language to be challenging,
and I'm sure you could think of something where that would be impactful.

Do you have any hobbies or interests outside of tech that you could apply your
skills toward? That would help fulfill the interesting, and satisfying
criteria you are looking for.

~~~
that_thing
What I'm working on right now is a project to decode a certain technical book
publisher's output of their books. They provide free views of all the chapters
of their books with words below a certain length having their letters
consistently (but randomly per word) replaced with other letters. Words over a
certain length have their letters not replaced but shuffled. Things like
punctuation are left unchanged.

This is an interesting problem that requires good data structures, good input
data (n-gram statistics), can be improved with skills in lexing and parsing.
It's just a really neat problem.

I don't mind buying the books, but present an interesting challenge and I'm
hooked.

My job is actually pretty nice. I genuinely like my coworkers and I work
remotely. I just get bored and frustrated with the way web dev goes.

Don't want to say more than that.

------
arduinomancer
Definitely try programming something visual or something that uses graphics.
Its really fun and there's sometimes hilarious results when regular software
bugs are immediately visible in the output on your screen.

If you're a webdev I'd try messing around with Three.JS or even just the HTML
canvas element if you want to just do something 3D.

~~~
beaconstudios
+1 for Three.js - its API is very accessible and easy to understand even for
people without prior graphics experience.

------
hoaw
Unfortunately I don't think there are too many shortcuts. You really have to
figure out what is important to you and try to stand by that. Doing something
new can help you turn the page, but if it doesn't change your perspective you
might end up with the same problems. It could also be that you are in the
wrong environment.

------
wrestlerman
I really like the feeling when you are learning a new language and you build
something and it works.

On the other hand, I find programming cool, when you are building your own
stuff. You design it, you put constraints on it and then you develop it and it
works! Not only it works in terms of 200 status, but also it does fix your
problem.

------
dannykwells
I personally love interactive data visualizations. It's easy to pile on
dimensions to a plot; it's much harder to make it fun, interesting and usable.
It's nice mix of the artistic side of my brain and the analytic side, too.

------
AnimalMuppet
I find embedded systems to (often) be both challenging and satisfying.

~~~
mkgolden
Came here to say this.

------
hbcondo714
I find integrating a new API into an existing app fun. It allows me to learn
something new while adding more functionality into software I'm already vested
in.

------
yesenadam
>interesting, impactful, challenging, lighthearted, or otherwise more
satisfying areas

These things are mostly subjective, I think - different for everyone. But
still, good question!

~~~
that_thing
It's boring to only ask questions with objective answers! The opinion section
of the newspaper is often my favorite. I'm enjoying people's responses.

~~~
yesenadam
>It's boring to only ask questions with objective answers!

Yeah, the questions closed for being opinion-based on the StackExchanges are
the best. Like Best books on subject X.

------
aprdm
Visual Effects !! lots of python and C++ to generate amazing pictures, lots of
CPU power (50k+ cores on prems in a big studio) and I/O transfer (100 tbs a
day)

------
robrain
Functional. I favour Elixir, but any flavour's fun after years of procedural
or OO. Kind of feels like the future and the deep past all at once.

------
SomeHacker44
I find the 2-3 feet opposite the monitor and 16 inches from the keyboard and
mouse to be my most fun area. But hey, I have tried others and myriad postures
to boot.

:)

------
vkaku
Visual programming is fun. Audio programming is fun. Hence, programming
microcontrollers with visual and auditory outputs is also fun.

------
adamnemecek
Shaders are cool. [https://shadertoy.com](https://shadertoy.com)

~~~
mig4ng
This website crashed my chrome, my laptop is not that powerful, beware if you
have a slow machine.

~~~
antoineMoPa
I created [https://shadergif.com](https://shadergif.com) which has similar
features (bonus: p5.js coding). I render gifs in the feed though, preventing
most laptop crashes. We are a very tiny community now, but we have fun! (like
3 actually active monthly users)

------
jgaa
Anything but web development is fun :)

Unless you write the web-server, or course. That is fun.

------
diehunde
In my opinion, building data pipelines

