“Host” fucked me up and is the reason I don’t watch horror movies anymore. I’m a huge baby though.

Check out gamemode if you’re gaming, it should improve performance a little bit

Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

Then they put on the socks and become girls

Fair

It’s kind of amazing how relevant this still is, 28 years later.

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

I’m proud of you.

Oh you’re so right, I never use those so I completely forgot :X

In Elixir & Erlang, they don’t even have a for-loop construct. You have to use recursion. And I think that’s beautiful. I also think tail-call optimization is beautiful.

SEX UPDATE, NOW WITH GUN

Space Engineers but not a buggy mess with player scripting that isn’t in C# of all things.

I was using Fedora for about a year and it was great. Nice and stable, almost everything worked out of the box. Then I goofed up an update and had to install something new, and I chose Arch. Arch is working mostly fine, of course I had to learn a thing or two about how some subsystems worked but the Arch wiki is a wonderful resource. We’ll see how long this install lasts, it’s been smooth sailing for about a month now.

Element supports video calling and it has been working great for me.