I saw this post by Juha-Matti about people having a tendency to get into social media and forget that there's real life beyond it. The sort of people who start a hobby for fun and then start thinking you can't have a casual hobby anymore. They see people on social media selling stuff for it. And start trying to achieve the same sort of "success" at it like the picture perfect influencer. But without realising what they're looking at a person who is running a business.

So what's my hobby? Writing code, yes I know that's also my job but that's the genius/nightmare of my life. Ever since I got my Speccy for Christmas in 1982, I could be found just playing with code of some sort at some form of computer. I've poked around in so many languages it's silly. Which is why I have "opinions" about languages and syntax.

When I went to university, on the first day of programming class the lecturer went round the class asking us if we'd done any programming and in what languages. When it got to me, I rattled off maybe 5 or 6 off the top of my head. The lecturers response was "When in doubt say every language you've ever heard of and make a few up". 🤯 I was ducking livid, 1. I had tried all the ones I'd said, I may not have been proficient at them but I've tried and B. Just because you've never heard of AMOS doesn't mean it's made up, you patronising little...😠 anyway, I'm getting distracted.

The point being I like playing with code, it doesn't have to be anything more that to see if I can do a thing. I don't need to open-source it. I don't need to have it available on the Google Play store. Quite often it doesn't even result in a working application, it's just enough to see if I can do it.

When I look back on my life, I get a warm fuzzy feeling for that time I was heavily into XNA. I knew a lot of people who were XNA game Devs back in the day. I followed their blogs and listened to podcasts, celebrated them getting Microsoft MVP awards and making game releases. I still check in on some of them to see where they're at today. Not everyone's still making games, but some are.

For me the wheels started to come off when I tried to release games rather than just doing it for fun. I was already working as a full stack web-developer, and that had all but kill off my enjoyment of building websites and blogging, and then I went and did the same thing to game development.

I recently, found some of my old code and I mean OLD. This was a version of my Dodge game written in Pascal for DOS. I was amazed, I used to comment everything. I was genuinely impressed with past me, and I remembered that feeling of fun I used to get.

I want it back.

I'd like to get back into doing tutorials or at the very least "look what I did" posts. Working on myPOSSE was great, right up to the point where I started trying to make it so that other people would want to use it.

That was never the point.

It was to help me get my site out.

That's when it was fun.

Solving for my problems.

Making a thing to get my stuff done.

I will probably re-release my games some way or other, but I have to remember it's not about money or a job.

It's just a hobby, and it should stay that way.