The blissful Zen of a good side project

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Emotional role of side projects

  • Many describe side projects as sanity-saving relief from soul‑crushing day jobs dominated by JIRA, meetings, and bureaucracy.
  • They provide agency, creative ownership, and a safe “world you invented” where code quality can be either higher than work—or gleefully hacky—without judgment.
  • Several see them as an antidote to burnout and a way to reconnect with why they liked coding or the web in the first place.

Freedom vs constraints

  • Key sources of “zen”: no deadlines, no stakeholders, no politics, and the ability to rewrite, overengineer, or throw away work at will.
  • At work, once something functions it rarely gets refined; side projects allow endless tinkering, refactoring, and experimentation with unusual ideas or tech stacks.
  • Some explicitly contrast constrained enterprise environments with the joy of choosing tools, architecture, and scope freely.

Consumption vs creation

  • Many recount hitting a wall with video games/TV and finding more lasting satisfaction shifting time toward making things.
  • The “creation‑to‑consumption ratio” becomes a useful mental model; some feel guilty when consuming too much, others warn against never allowing yourself to just relax.
  • Multiple commenters note cyclical creativity tied to stress, seasons, or (speculatively) hormones; high stress often wipes out creative energy.

AI, “vibe coding,” and tooling

  • LLMs are widely credited with enabling ambitious side projects in unfamiliar domains (home routers, IoT, ESP32, Anki workflows, newsletter infrastructure).
  • Debate around “vibe coding”: using AI as an exploratory assistant is praised; fully delegating code generation without understanding it is viewed more skeptically.

Kinds of projects and outcomes

  • Examples range from SFF water‑cooled PCs and 6502 simulators to homemade kilns, language‑learning decks, status bars, small games, and multi‑year web apps.
  • Some projects stay purely personal “zen gardens”; others evolve into side businesses that approach or achieve meaningful revenue.
  • Not all side projects are blissful—reverse‑engineering obscure formats or wrestling bad libraries can be pure grind.

Time, life stage, and meaning

  • Parents often struggle to find time; trade‑offs with family and rest are foregrounded.
  • Philosophically, some embrace the article’s “we exist to create” stance; others argue meaning also comes from relationships, presence, and simple joy, not only production.