Ask Lemmy

I write Python for fun, I'm not a programmer. The more you learn, the more you can do. I've written a lot of scripts and tools to help me automate tasks I do frequently. It's a lot of fun to dream up an idea and then make it real, and then later add random features that pop into my head. Windows sucks.

A lot of the programming that I do for fun is programming challenges like Advent of Code. They're more like games or puzzles than projects. You don't have to wrestle with build tools or old libraries or other people's crappy code or learn complicated frameworks.

I like the art of programming. I like to find elegant ways to express ideas. I like to learn new paradigms and language features that allow me to think differently about problems. It's nice to find a way to make the code readable by matching the code to the problem statement.

Or there's the challenge of fluent style, where instead of the code reading in the typical programming style with caveman grammar, you go out of your way to make read like English.

Something as simple as using Shell Scripting to automate tasks (say, rename all files in a directory according to a certain pattern) is programming in Linux and most of these you can even do directly in the shell (i.e. just type a few lines of code on the command line directly, no need to have a file with the program or do any kind of compilation).

Also it's stupidly simple to program in certain languages like Perl and Python in Linux mainly because you're just working in the command line interface and most of what those languages do is that kind of thing (rather than graphical UI stuff), those languages come almost invariably pre-installed in Linux distros, and you can use the same trick as with shell scripting of just starting the interpreter and type the code directly to run it.

Beyond that, if you're actually doing stuff like server-side software development, Linux is overwhelmingly dominant in that space and it's way simpler to, when targetting Linux servers, to just work on your own Linux as developer (user) machine because all the tools for remote access to Unix machines are there nativelly and work seamlessly, plus you can can have the developer machine double as a development environment for server side development (as Linux can still act as a server machine even when you're running it as a user machine).

I like microcontrollers. It is fun to see code do physical things. Plus, you can learn how simple computers work, which helps get an understanding of regular ones. Combine that with home automation, and you have an infinite time sink.

Most embedded systems programming software runs nicely on Linux (or sometimes even exclusively). PlatformIO, Arduino IDE, STM Cube, ESP-IDF... Obviously, something like a Raspberry Pi (and its alternatives) runs Linux itself.

Although, quite often, I find myself saying that since 90% of work and hobbies is either in a browser (including electron) or a shell anyways. Doesn't really matter how the task bar / dock looks when all you do is run the same 10 programs

I like to solve everyday problems through programming. My primary way of doing it is just Python on Windows right now, but Linux does make programming languages a bit easier to access. (And most of the stuff I write would easily run on Linux too.)

Every time I go "damn, this is more complicated/boring than it needs to be and the manual handling is so unnecessary, I wish I could automate this", I start making a script.

For example, I'm an amateur photographer, so I have scripts for dealing with photos. One is a photo importer/backup tool, because I didn't trust the importers in the apps to do it right (Adobe trauma). I'm writing scripts for report purposes. One script I wrote puts all of the photos I have on the map.

Sounds like you want a project.

You could try making a game. Python has pygame. Godot is a bit of a steeper learning step but has a lot of capabilities. I've messed around with each for fun.

Web dev can also be fun, and a very different style of coding. I've made things for a loved one who wanted some things for a site they run. Each thing they asked for took me no more than a day but saved them having to hire someone. I also made a little one-file site that I could share with some people as an RPG reference.

There are also coding games, as in games where you write code as part of the gameplay. These can help in that they give you a goal. Known names include computercraft mod for minecraft, screeps as both mmo and arena battle, Shenzhen I/O and other Zachtronics and zach-like games, The Farmer Was Replaced, etc.

And of course, you can always just think of something. I've written a few scripts to do simple edits to files, like 'open each file in the folder this is run in and change blahblah to bloobloo and increment the version number' or batch renaming files. Did one to find duplicate files and list them for organization/deletion.

I have other things I've started but never finished, but I enjoyed working on them, and they weren't my job, so no worries.

I started out with games and simulators. I tended just to come up with some game logic and then see what happened when I let it play out with many entities. When I started my computer science degree at uni I tended to write more code that had something to do with recent lecture material. Implementing Distance Vector Routing, messing around with compression, applying reinforcement learning to my own games.

Now that I have a job it's a bit harder to stay motivated for all this, but it's still kinda the same. I just write whatever my brain comes up with.

I just want to learn it to know it

Acquiring a skill just to have it isnt how it works. Skills are perishable, meaning you will unlearn them just as easy. Of course much experience would take a long time but still.

I suggest imagining what you could do with programming. What little problems do you face that could be solved by programming?

You also dont need to write another operaring system or debug "a whole game". If you decide you want to learn programming (because its fun or because you like to create and fix shit), you can make an app run on your computer or phone that didnt run before. I did exactly that and my programming skills are pretty small. You dont have to know all the algorithms or study it to do useful stuff with it.

I made a couple text based games, solved some advent of code riddles and so on. Its fun and it helps seeing the world as a canvas instead of a fixed structure that is applied to you.

So, I make things for myself to replace commercial software that either doesn't exist or that is becoming (or will become) enshittified like all commercial software.

I like to cook, for instance. It's a hobby of mine. Cooking, BBQ, grilling, baking, all of it. So of course, I have recipes and they are important to me. I could spend all my time painstakingly entering all my recipes into recipes dot com or whatever, right? But of course, as soon as I do that, their barely usable app that does almost everything I want (and a hundred things I don't give a shit about) gets updated in the third update of the week (rolleyes) and they have completely changed the UI and on top of that, they removed a feature that I used daily.

OR - I could just make my own fucking app. Which I did. It's awesome, it does everything I need and nothing I don't. It also doesn't update every thirty seconds and become less and less usable or require me to completely overhaul my workflow because the programming staff and middle management need to justify their existences.

I also recently made a wishlist extension for Firefox, because Amazon removed the ability to add non-Amazon items to their wishlist. I have probably a dozen other ideas I'm working on at any given time. None of this is to make money, but just to make my life more convenient and unplug myself from the wider (bullshit) Internet as much as possible.

Something like Automate the Boring Stuff might be a good option for what you want. Programming is just another tool to solve a problem.

For example, I hated when I would archive an unread email, it would remain as unread. So I created a script to mark any archived emails as read, and that script runs every couple of hours.

You will never know enough to make a whole program when you never start. Programming small things is very different to big things. You could also try making small changes to big things.

If you use computers enough, from time to time you'll run into things that make you think "I wish there was a better/easier/faster way to do this". Then if you know how to program, you can just create a tool to do it for you.

For example, I once made a small calculator app that allowed math on time values instead of basic numbers, so if I did 47*2 it would show 01:34 instead of 94. Some other time I worked some place that played background music all over the building, but something as simple as skipping the current music required going through 4-5 screens in some internal software, so I made a tool that went through those screens for me with a single button click.

I wrote a little bit of code to tell me if or when my electricity would be cheaper if I used on demand pricing instead of flat rate. Basically anything you might use excel for could be a programming problem.

For other hobby projects and "why Linux" it's easier to sew things together than windows, generally speaking.

Example:

Every time I sit down at my PC the first thing I usually do is open a terminal: it is both my launcher and my file manager. I have several programs with TUI (terminal user interface) or text based API (which is an applied programming interface) and I keep my notes in plain text. One type of note I keep is an "atomic" note inside my zettelkasten (this is a fancy way of keeping track of ideas and the way they connect together, but you need to revisit them for it to be useful. Kinda like anki / spaced reputation I guess).

So enough background, here's the idea and the programming:

• If I always open a terminal, it's a good place to put stuff I want to see.

• There are two things I want to see: twice a day I want to see a note, the rest of the time I want to see the 3 or 4 most important tasks on my todo list

• I want randomized notes and I want it to be automatic.

One of the easiest things you can do in a terminal is "echo" text. So I started by, in my terminal "rc" file (the configuration file that tells the terminal what to do when you start it) echoing my todo list as the very last step in the start process. Then it's refinement. First don't give me the whole list, use shell tools to show the head of the list. Now make a conditional statement that says "if there's a file called "temp" in some folder give me the Todo list, otherwise do nothing". Basically we follow the incremental logic train until you get the final product:

• If no file exists, print a note (at random) and then make the file
• If the file exists write part of the todo list
• Every 6 hours, delete the file automatically with cron

Neat you just programmed a lame, but useful tool.

You need a Bob Ross programming series. A little C here and more Python there.

For me it's:

Oh shit, that last update borked my computer... wth is postfix? How was it corrupted? Whatever... How do I reinstall it... [look up answer an Ask Ubuntu- Copy/Paste]; okay cool. Wait, losing postfix also broke my graphics driver?! Why? Whatever... I guess I should reinstall it... [look up answer an Ask Ubuntu- Copy/Paste]; okay cool.

Then I forget everything I just did because Ubuntu rarely breaks and also I think it was just my ssd dying...

I have trouble understanding what people are actually programming if it isn’t their job. Like, you go to your computer and start working on…what?

I've written some simple shell scripting to ease repetitive tasks, that's about it (like play random video/audio files in MPV media player, resize & convert images I post on my website, and so on). Does that count as programing? ;)

I like to automate processes I keep repeating on my machine. For example, there are some documents I receive every month, like bank statements and phone bills. Since the naming conventions of those files are atrocious, I wrote a little program to automatically fix those for me

Some people also like participating in the development of open source software. That requires you to be a somewhat decent programmer already, though, as you'll have to work with integrated systems

Instead of a long-winded post, here's a quick list of stuff that I've worked on in my free time over the last few months:

• Some scripts to automatically set some metadata on my photo library
• A tool that grabs a video stream from an HDMI input (from the OS's point of view that looks just like any webcam), finds text in it and overlays a translation. I use that to play Japanese visual novels on my Switch
• A simple Bubble Shooter game because my gf was frustrated with some bugs in the one she had found online
• A simple 2D game engine and editor inspired by RPG Maker XP
• Updates to the registration website for a community event that I host twice a year
• Updates to a discord bot that automates some dice rolls for my online TTRPG sessions
• A browser extension that helps me scrape some data from a specific website
• Helped a friend port an old website from PHP5 to PHP8

Overall, it's mostly stuff that is useful for my hobbies for which I can't find an existing solution that fits my use case.

There’s a mix of reasons to start a hobby project.

One reason for starting a hobby project is the learning experience. For example, learning a new programming language or a particular tech stack. The goal isn’t to build something useful. Often it can be building things that already exist. For example, a Minecraft server or a Gameboy emulator.

Another reason is to build something useful for you. Maybe you have an idea of a program you feel should exist. Or maybe a program exists, but not in the way you want. Building it yourself can bridge this gap. Hopefully someone else might find your program useful.

Then there’s also the people who do it for fun. It’s kind of like building a model railway. The process of building it can be more fun and rewarding than actually using it.

Regarding Linux, it’s mostly a matter of preference. There are some things that are easier in Linux. Mac and Windows can sometimes be ” overly protective” and prevent the user from doing particular things. Linux has generally fewer of such barriers.

I do some programming as a hobby. I'm far from being an expert or even competent at it. You work on whatever you WANT to work on. Sometimes this can be born from necessity, you need your computer to do something, but you can't find any existing application that does the specific thing that you need. Sometimes maybe you just want to create something, just because it seems interesting to you, or just because.

So just for example, one of my hobbies involves working with video. Years ago, I was frustrated with the options available for encoding my videos into h264, so I ended up creating my own GUI around FFMPEG. It was easy enough and effective for what I needed, that the tool became quite popular among others in my hobby.

Recently, machine learning has made it possible to do cool stuff like remove the background from a video clip. A lot of this stuff is really difficult to even get working, let alone to use effectively. So a current project I'm working on is a GUI for such a tool to make it really easy to use.

So yeah... First I would say you need to figure out what you want to do. Why do you want to write a program? What do you want to accomplish?

Then you need to learn the basics of programming in whatever language you intend to use. And just gain a basic understanding of how programming works in general. Once you know enough to be dangerous, you can start working on something. Getting started is the hardest part, and involves really thinking about your problem, breaking it down into smaller parts, and considering how to solve each of those small parts. This can involve lots of research, lots of googling, and finding frameworks or libraries that might help you accomplish what you need.

LLMs like chatgpt have also been amazing in helping people like me to create something much more quickly than before. I can ask it for thoughts on how to accomplish a specific thing, or even have it write entire sections of code for me. Just yesterday, I had it create a script for me which I estimate would have taken me 10-20 hours to write on my own. However, they don't always give right answers, so it's really important to have a basic level of understanding of programming so that you can understand the code that it gives you. I don't use any code until I understand how it works. The LLM can also help explain the code to you!

This feels more like two questions, so I'll answer them both:

1. When I'm not programming for my job, I'm programming one of many side projects I have going on at any time. Same with any other professional who has a career in their hobby. These are often projects I think would be useful to me and I believe would let me learn new skills.
2. I use Linux (and MacOS) because the Unix environment, particularly the command line tooling is far superior to Windows. Developers often work on Unix, so they build their tools for the platform and thus improvements stack up. I also just like the FOSS philosophy underpinning most Linux.

If you're trying to learn programming and know at least some basics, my only advice is to pick a project you're even a little interested in and get started. Don't worry about operating system, it doesn't actually matter that much unless you're working on iOS or MacOS! A weather app for whatever language/platform you're working with is usually my first suggestion for students.

Linux lets\makes you interact with a terminal (and just OS tinkering) more, so you become a bit more comfortable with writing simple commands and then code.

One of the things for basic Python and default libs is sorting your Downloads folder into a more logical filestructure that doesn't need reshuffling and searching for long. Move pictures into Pictures and sort them accordingly to the year\month you saved them for example. Make the script run once a week. Make it write a log file as it runs.

I did this one for the sake of it, but then I needed a piece of code to bruteforce the PDF file password protection, so I used a lib to access and resave this file without a password. On every attempt to open it, it inserted another password from either freely availiable databases of simple passes or well-known leaks (rockyou). It worked nice for PDFs I needed to crack to, actually, just print on paper, but also worked when I tested it with combinations of random words and symbols I came up with. I needed a lib to open a pdf, a list of passwords to try (althought, a bit pre-formatted), and a couple of victims to test on.

That's the most difficult problem in hobby programming: finding a project. Most interesting things seem to complex to start.

The solution is to say f it I'm going to try. Right now I'm very slowly making progress learning Rust by writing a program to trade cryptocurrency. It took a while for me to even take my goals seriously as something I am capable of. It's half gambling and half skills development but 100% interesting enough that I have consistently come back to it. I've come to terms with the fact that the only money it will make me is if I get a better job by becoming a rust developer.

The Linux side of programming only really comes into play when you want to do networking, drivers, or esoteric filesystem intensive stuff. Windows and MacOS are capable of basically the same things. The main benefit of using Linux for development is that most open source projects are built by developers for development on Linux based systems, so getting dependencies has an easy one line command someone already figured out. For your situation I suspect the most important thing is how cool it feels when you use it. There's something about setting up an operating system the way you want that keeps me coming back for more.

The short answer is: it depends on what you’re doing.

Most servers run on Linux, so anything related with web backends or high performance computing (rendering, complex algorithms) will likely be deployed on Linux in production, so the devs may choose to do the whole program lifecycle from there (even if the language/framework is OS agnostic and could be developed from anywhere).

Other kinds of programs like video games may need a windows for their entire lifecycle, and iOS apps need macOS.

There is likely no “need” to develop from Linux, and it’s not necessary better, but some people may choose it for the entire lifecycle anyway

I currently write a number of little programs, each running on a small processor that lights up a module of my model. They all communicate via WiFi with a Mosquitto broker that coordinates the lighting and the visitor interaction modules.

The test case is a moon base with about a dozen nodes, and later I'll do the city with nearly a hundred processors.

And that's just one project. I also wrote an ERP system for the parts I need for building, or tools for text processing, or a mediaWiki extension.

And yes, I do all this on Linux.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I'm currently designing a digital sythesizer running on an FPGA to add sound to one of my models. Just to show you that all kinds of programming can be done on Linux.

If you want examples of what people work on check out the public github repositories, they range from big open source projects with multiple developers, testers, etc to small projects only one person has worked on.

Many languages/build chains will provide template projects these days to give you some baseline to build from instead of an empty directory. Maven archetypes for example in Java or https://start.spring.io/ for spring projects in Java/kotlin/groovy. But that's just to give you some structure and frameworks so you're not starting with a blank canvas.

Different languages will appeal to different practices too, like a compiled language you'll want to leverage debuggers and logging, but an interactive language, or one that offers both compiled and interactive, may have a REPL or command line prompt to work against to try out ideas before saving them in a script or class file.

Automation is a common reason to program outside of a job. I created tools to scrape websites, control my home entertainment system, and nerdy shit like pulling stats from my router. Someone who does a podcast that I enjoy created a thing that lets him know the state of their garage door via an LED (open vs closed). Silly stuff like this is really about scratching a personal itch more than it's about solving life issues. It's fun for some people and probably not fun for others.

It depends on what you are interested in. For me it is a mix of stuff that I need or stuff that just interests me. I'm on and off working on a gameboy emulator, or I've written a command line parser library because I wanted so see how it works internally, or a terminal emulator

A lot of the tools are available, for free, in a consistent format from whatever distro’s repo. These tools and libraries are accessible from the CLI and therefore scriptable. This makes for a level os automation and consistency you might not get on windows.

I don't care about which operating system, but my hobby projects have always included things that help myself. E.g.

• Software to collect/archive/analyse real life data (e.g. real estate data from various sources).
• Scripts to parse and structure data that I need e.g. for learning other things.
• Firmware for small embedded electronics.
• Home automation.

So my suggestion is to think of something that you need, but there isn't a perfect solution yet. Although this advice comes from someone who has been working in software development for two decades now.

If you haven't programmed before, think something very very small first.

I wrote two apps for android giving me access to health data of food, stored in a local database to work without net access.

Then I wrote a software to mass-balance rotors with many exchangeable blades. Also software to encode/decode hex strings containing certain formated data. Both for windows.

This happened sometimes several years inbetween. Scripting in bash, perl, php python for other computer and homecontrol stuff.

As a hobby programmer I tought programming myself. Coming from VB6 era (I know I know) I sticked to that type of language syntax, not spaghetti code though.

What I want to say is there is sometimes an idea and then stick to it and try to accomplish. Maybe its too complicated at first but then you learn until next time works out. Its a marathon not a sprint.

For me personally, it's a couple of self-hosted apps. It's not technically programming, more scripting.

But I've also dabbled in using Python for some personal data analysis. That works just fine on Windows since I use Power BI for the visualization.

I've had some folks at my school creating their own forks of open source software. Modding games, modding tools, modding the OS for whatever.

I programmed a lamp bypass for my old projector do I could then use a different lamp and turn it into a UV projector. Programming is not sophisticated stuff. Its the reason for having a computer. People could write, mail, watch TV, play etc just fine before computers.