My projects have me jumping through hoops of a wide variety of technology, talking to people, writing, and even designing graphics. Sometimes I like to sit down and write something simple, as a way to relax.
Sometimes I find my own code projects to be relaxing. The MDL parser I'm working on now is one of them. I don't have any timelines, nor pressure to get it done.
Oddly, the pressure to get something done is one of the reasons why I gave up on my programming language. Perhaps it's the size of the project that makes a difference. My MDL project is small in scope and is useful almost immediately.
I used to code on Twitch streams as well. At first, it was relaxing, but I found an audience took that away somewhat. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't relaxing either. As I coded the bots to fight others, I could feel people depending on me -- it really made no difference how few there were!
But MDL is relaxing, which leads to a problem other workaholics will identify with. Because it's relaxing, that work part of my brain isn't satisfied and continues questioning whether I should work on it, and often doesn't even let me start working on it. Though, I suppose this is another tale altogether.
Do you code to relax? If yes, then what do you code?
Top comments (34)
My coding for relaxation typically revolves around my CodePen. Just the little "Hey is this possible" or playing around with new tech just to get more familiar with it:
or recreating things as closely as I can with CSS (looks better on CodePen or hit the 0.5x button):
(That was a fun project that forced me to learn a lot, plus it blew up on CodePen. 33k views?! What?!)
I find it most relaxing when it's not really related to anything I'm currently working on, but still mentally stimulating and helps me learn.
Playing with animation is fun!
Most definitely. Started playing around with GSAP recently, and holy cow, it's amazing.
Wow! This is really impressive!
I was in an interview recently that didn’t like the idea of coding to relax. They wanted to see open source contributions, community involvement, and projects showing I know the new shinny things, but also wanted me to talk about the non-tech things I do to relax. That stressed me out. Why can’t silly or fun projects be relaxing?! Glad to see other people like to code to relax!
I wouldn't talk about coding to relax. I do side projects to learn new things, it is funny and not stressful, but I'm still working on my computer.
Relax is something different, and at least in my case doesn't involve technology.
If I need to name a relaxing activity I do on my computer is watching video or reading something, but coding requires attention, even if is not demanding and there are no deadlines.
This 100%
My code livelihood is fairly intertwined with DEV these days, so my "relaxation" time is often interesting things related to the health and future of the project, as opposed to my day-to-day which is mostly coordinating the important/urgent things for the short term health of the community and sustainability of the business.
Before we went open source, I would spend relaxing time hacking away at little things that needed to happen before we did that. These days, if I sit down to have a relaxing code session, it revolves around "generalization" of the product—where different people can create community platforms based on our work.
For example, this PR serves some immediate value, but my mindset was that it gets us closer to "generalization" by removing hardcoded static pages from the codebase.
What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)
Description
This PR allows admins to generate "pages" about anything, such as "about".
Currently all generated pages live at
/page/:slugin terms of routes, except I did add new functionality to/aboutin order to generate that one with the current about page being the fallback.Eventually everything considered a "page" for community or marketing purposes can live in a model. We will have some questions about how we ultimately want to route everything.
Once this part of what we're doing gets close enough to reality, we'll pull this project in and make it something we talk about and do as "work". For now, I treat it as relaxing "me time" with no deadline or purpose outside of the interesting code arrangement questions.
That's great. I've been on several projects where I was relaxed working on the side-features. It has the added value of keeping spirits up about the necessary work, since it all feels more worthwhile as a whole then.
I go to stackoverflow and search for unanswered questions especially negative votes and questions marked for on hold or close. Those are the questions asked generally by novice developers where they are really stuck and doesn't have enough knowledge.
I feel satisfied(relax!) when they find the solution. Sometime I create quick dirty PR to help them so they can move.
Call me crazy, but I write unit tests. There's something about the cycle of red -> green -> refactor that I find incredibly soothing (which is also one reason why I love TDD).
Also, if I've got an extended period of down time that I can't spend in the mountains, I learn new languages. I often don't use them after an initial period of learning (I've never written a line of Clojure that wasn't in my book!), but it fills my need to solve problems without the pressure of deadlines and such.
I enjoy writing tests and documentation. Most colleagues would call me crazy, but I just enjoy all parts of software development process (well, almost all; the only thing I hate is deployment without containers).
Great question - After a long day at work I try to stay away from all work related projects. The best coding I do to "relax" would be studying new languages, theories, and concepts. I picked up a book on Machine Learning last month and have been engrossed in that, and have also been learning Python on the side (I mostly work in C# and JS frameworks at work). I think getting out of the comfort zone is really important for developers to hone in new schools, expand their knowledge, and also it doesn't feel like work.
I recently wrote for fun some Python code (GitHub | Bezier.py) which can plot 3D+ Bezier curves. Basically mathematician's child's play. It's always funny once you've accomplished your vision, and you see all the little tweaks you could do to take it one step further. It just never stops, and it's quite fun.
I don't do that, and i felt like an imposter. It took a few years to realize, that everybody is different. That helped me quite a bit, to enjoy my hobbies (again). I now just play guitar and do photography without a bad conscience nagging me :)
One of my rituals in the morning is to write a "Daily", which is basically a small journal entry of what my code and personal development goals are for that day.
The benefit of this to me is that by writing it down, I'm hyper aware of my progress. Every few hours or whenever I fall out of flow I'll go back to the entry and add a comment or two of new libraries I found or lessons learned while debugging something.
I find that it's super therapeutic because it breaks up my day between coding and non coding sessions that are still centered around the project. It also creates a running devlog of everything I do that I can later either clean up as a blog post or just share on Twitter as a list of cool things I found!
Anything in Ada is pure bliss after a while in C/CPP swamps. Other than that though, Eulora encourages players to make their own bots and artists to make their own art so perhaps something you might find relaxing?