by examplary_cable on 12/14/22, 2:23 PM with 91 comments
What is it that you're working on, be it an area, company, game, language, subject, cause etc. That you expect to work until the end of your life?
Starting with me it's a little bit hard. I have so many interests that picking a single one out of all of them is hard. But I plan on working on companies, causes, philosophies, books, areas etc.
Some of the areas I'm interested in are: Intelligence, IQ, Collective Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Writing, Sleep, Comics, AI, Game Design, Meta Cognition, Zettelkasten, Linguistics, Design, Coordination etc.
My current project is: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook. It's a mixture of Roam Research, Obsidian, Emacs, VSCode(in the future), Figma etc.
I plan on making an online mode for people to share and collaborate with other people being as easy as sharing a link. I don't plan on making this my "Life's Work" because I believe other opportunities will arise as I go in life.
Examples: - Minecraft(Notch) - RimWorld(Tynan Sylvester) - C++(Bjarne Stroustrup) - Java(James Gosling) - Linux Kernel(Linus Torvalds) - SpaxeX, Tesla(Elon Musk) - Growth Mindset(Carol Dweck)
So ... here it is, what's something you're so dedicated to that you're willing to call it "your life's work"?
by cwbrandsma on 12/14/22, 4:50 PM
One kid will be a nurse, another is in engineering school, another seems to be destined to be an artist, and the last two can do almost anything. But even more importantly, they are all kind people (nerdy, but kind). I will take that.
by mark_l_watson on 12/14/22, 4:37 PM
Professionally, around 1978 I had an epiphany: I realized that I was sometimes very good/lucky at solving ‘show stopper’ type problems at work, and I 99% freed myself from worrying about my job. I started a hard policy of working just 32 hours a week (taking 80% salary) and prioritized learning things that I cared about. I also became more generous in putting energy into helping coworkers; I have had 6 visits this year from old co-workers (I live off the beaten path in Sedona Arizona) so I don’t feel like I am just bragging when I say I have respected coworkers and cared about them.
So really, my life’s work is learning what I want to learn in tech and spirituality (mostly Self Realization Fellowship and also Buddhism).
EDIT: I forgot the ‘big thing’: I love my family and friends.
by akuro on 12/14/22, 4:53 PM
My entire life is based around the academic route. I fell in love with a girl whose great desire in life was to settle securely in one place and have a family. To have a 9-5 job where she could spend the rest of the time in leisure with the person she loves, who presumably would also have a more laidback career. This is the opposite of the life of an academic. Stress, poor schedules and constant intense work and study. A professor who I deeply respect worked from 6AM to 11PM, 6 days a week for most of his post-doctoral years. I personally love the intensity of an academic life and working at breakneck pace is something I deeply enjoy.
Recently, I chose my scientific career over her. I suppose that I will be wondering my entire life whether I made the right choice.
by hirvi74 on 12/14/22, 4:32 PM
by throwaway22032 on 12/14/22, 3:40 PM
More seriously, learning.
We have enough of everything. Almost all of the technological breakthroughs I can think of have eventually been used to excess and ended up crippling us in some way, I'm quite content with just being.
by bko on 12/14/22, 5:08 PM
I have a lot of hobbies and try to contribute what I can with my skill set. But I'm honest with myself. Nothing meaningful I create in the digital form will outlive me so I'm never overly attached. I've also lived long enough to see my interests change drastically that I am confident I won't have the same interests in 5, 10, 20 years (nor would I want to)
However with children I hope to serve as an influence and guide for my entire life.
by obloid on 12/14/22, 5:14 PM
edit:grammar
by zackmorris on 12/14/22, 4:57 PM
I had lists like yours in the 1990s, but working to make rent eventually expanded to use up all of my time. Now I practice meditation and stoicism, work on myself with bodybuilding and kickboxing, but have no expectation that things will improve.
That said, I didn't know about manifestation, or such basic principles as the difference between reason and meaning. So I believe that I inadvertently shifted into this difficult reality. In the end, all that matters is consciousness and being alive. So I silenced my inner monologue, experienced ego death and the dark night of the soul, and am putting my energy into reconnecting with love for all things. Practicing non-attachment and moving with the flow of life as things unfold with divine timing.
Loosely, imagine if everything was the opposite. Imagine if there were no billionaires, just rising median incomes and UBI. No dogma, no politics, just living life in peace. Being able to self-actualize and invent. Not.. whatever all this is. That's why I dream to let it all go and shift into the new age.
by samsquire on 12/14/22, 5:09 PM
Here are links to them https://github.com/samsquire/ideas https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 (incomplete) https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups
I am working on a multithreaded programming language interpreter and compiler. I am interested in parallelism, asynchrony and multithreading.
by jameal on 12/14/22, 2:56 PM
I used to just want to have a nice job with autonomy and to be able to work from home, until I got it and I realized that it wasn't as fulfilling as I thought it would be. I had security but I was disconnected.
There is so much disconnection in the world. We become disconnected from ourselves, from others and from reality. I think that it causes a lot of trouble for people personally and for society at large.
I used to be a complete introvert and would become overwhelmed easily. Now I truly enjoy meeting new people and being put in new situations. I want to help other people with their personal development because I see it as the greatest lever for creating a more connected humanity. I love development but this is what I'm truly passionate about.
by sassyonsunday on 12/14/22, 4:00 PM
by recursivedoubts on 12/14/22, 4:49 PM
technically:
https://htmx.org - bringing hypermedia back as a viable web architecture
https://hyperscript.org - bringing HyperTalk back as a viable scripting language
https://grugbrain.dev - bringing humility back as a viable programming vibe
by qdot76367 on 12/14/22, 3:47 PM
by fsn4dN69ey on 12/14/22, 5:03 PM
by igammarays on 12/14/22, 5:19 PM
by jstx1 on 12/14/22, 2:52 PM
by CincinnatiMan on 12/14/22, 4:24 PM
by rektide on 12/14/22, 4:52 PM
Presently, I believe client-side web, where computing represents itself as DOM (ex: react-router) serves as a good base to start to work from, where we can build more elements that help us view/examine/operate on the other elements.
by abnercoimbre on 12/14/22, 7:00 PM
Turns out operating conferences in American cities is a costly proposition... Thankfully I have an audience that's supporting me so far.
by binarysolo on 12/14/22, 8:37 PM
I've been heavily influenced by my hobbies and upbringing (almost went pro as a musician, had a heavily religious childhood) to treat life as my practice, so I just try to establish fundamental basics and work on them incrementally over time. Just focus on the journey and the nuance of each breath, each step and how fulfilled I feel... less on the big numbers and milestones and fanfare.
by l0b0 on 12/14/22, 9:47 PM
- Speeding up a third party app
- Productionising tools
- Simplifying, testing, linting & formatting all the things
- Reporting issues when I don't know how or what to fix
- Generally just having a dialogue with communities, avoiding the jerks and cheering/actively supporting the nice people
by soiler on 12/14/22, 6:04 PM
I'm in my early 30s and only in the last 5 years have I a) begun to learn programming, b) begun to learn about my own conditions, c) made serious effort to set goals for myself (besides a few pretty amazing one-offs in my youth). I am not having children (I made sure of that a few months ago), but I'm happy for all the people here who are. I hope I can pass on something important to other peoples' children. Actually, one more bullet point on my life's work: I want to be able to wake up every day and feel zero pressure to live up to my potential. Maybe I'll do it, maybe not, but all the adults who drowned young me in expectations without knowing who I really am don't deserve to keep telling me how to feel about myself.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 12/14/22, 4:47 PM
The coroner will need to rub "YTЯƎWϘ" off my cheek.
by kelseyfrog on 12/14/22, 4:54 PM
1. Gerson, L. (Ed.). (2017). Plotinus: The Enneads (G. Boys-Stones, J. Dillon, R. King, A. Smith, & J. Wilberding, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9780511736490
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power (Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale translators). New York: Random House, 1967. pp. 532–533
by bsenftner on 12/14/22, 5:17 PM
by scottLobster on 12/14/22, 5:33 PM
On one hand I can't/won't neglect my family by taking a job that requires sleeping under my desk/70 hour weeks for extended periods, despite how much I would probably enjoy the experience. I was stuck taking care of/recovering from a bad family situation during my twenties, and married soon after, so my opportunity to take such a role has passed, at least until my infant/toddler kids leave home in 17-19 years. Likewise I can't move too far away from extended family, wouldn't be fair to wife/kids and I actually get along well with said extended family, so it's good for me as well. So I can't work for SpaceX or NASA JPL (no family in CA), not that I have any desire to live in CA or TX anyway.
On the other hand I want to set an example for my kids (and myself) that you can have a family and still do cool stuff for a living, even if it naturally limits your options. Just grinding away at a soul-sucking 9-5 for another 35 years sounds like hell, even if it provides a decent standard of living. I should know, it's been hell for the last several years while I get my life in order/train up for jobs I actually want. The "ignore your job and just focus on your family" angle is defeat to me, and if I tried to force myself to think that way it would just manifest as resentment. I busted my ass to get this far, and I didn't do it just to give up on half of what I want.
Hopefully going to be ready to start applying some time in 2024, and we'll see what's available/what I can do. Either way I intend to build as strong family and as badass a career as my constraints allow, I imagine that's more than enough work to fill a life.
by phaedrus on 12/14/22, 5:29 PM
So I was working on the same game code (eventually just the game's engine; I had lost sight of the original goal) through the 2000s and 2010s. I had an initial period of great productivity (in lines-of-code), but the more I wrote the more work it was fighting bit-rot. As operating systems, graphics technology, and the C++ standard itself changed, I was perpetually playing catch-up to build-breaking changes rather than making new progress.
Over the course of time my git history had gotten convoluted, and I had also split things into a couple of repos. I considered re-merging everything back into one repository, and was debating whether to try to consolidate all the history or start a fresh repo with existing sources. My friends suggested: do neither; don't even start with the old source files. I could always mine my old work for useful code, but I didn't need to pull it all in just because it was there.
I.e. after more than a decade and a half of life's work that had only resulted in treading water trying to keep up with the changing technology I could just... stop.
Now instead of trying to push one codebase forward against the relentless march of entropy, I'm trying to work from a simpler premise: what do I need to build a game jam submission, and back-fill what I need from that goal. Even that goalpost keeps receding before me. (Any given game jam I might target will be over before I get the first pixels on the screen.) I guess I just work at a slower pace than the world moves.
With ambitious projects there's two ways to go about them: forward-chaining or backward-chaining. You can start from the beginning and build up (forward-chaining) then attempt to bend your arc of progress back Earth for eventual release. You're always in danger of discovering you've described a wider arc than you're able to close. Or you can start from what does a released thing look like and backward-chain to putting your original ideas into it.
What I've learned is neither strategy provides any guarantee, but if I'm still having this much trouble with the latter I certainly was never going to be able to close the loop on the former.
by zmgsabst on 12/14/22, 4:39 PM
Not a full time job, but been at it fives years and still going… so that seems the strongest contender so far.
[1] - Alegebra-geometry equivalence commutes with logic-computation equivalence; this provides a map between the world of type statements and the world of diffy-Q networks.
by swhitf on 12/14/22, 6:35 PM
I think I'll be working on this product for a long time as I believe there is a new generation of collaboration software coming to replace the current leaders and I would like to be one of them. I think about this product night and day, and wouldn't want to be building anything else!
by ezedv on 12/16/22, 2:06 PM
Since I didn't have any experience in deploying or creating a Web3 project, I contacted Rather Labs (https://www.ratherlabs.com), a Blockchain page that helps people to create Web3 projects.
From that moment on, my project was created and fully working. I hope this page can help contribute to the growth and development of the web3 world. If you have any questions or suggestions, I would love to hear from you.
by havaloc on 12/14/22, 6:19 PM
I've had people tell me it's helped them take new jobs, start relationships, and I have had emails from people working at all the major airlines how they use the site in various dispatch centers, and flight attendants working flights - and this is despite the airlines providing their own tools for turbulence. It feels very impactful and meaningful.
by nisegami on 12/14/22, 4:28 PM
by rmelton on 12/14/22, 4:38 PM
by GaryNumanVevo on 12/14/22, 9:30 PM
Of course it's great to have a focus! I've definitely focused on high performance optics for most of my career (haha). But life is a vastly complicated and messy thing, and I've gotten the most satisfaction out of taking a step back from projects that were demanding all my time. It's all about balance.
by shakna on 12/14/22, 5:09 PM
I've been working on a stack-based language, that is highly dynamic, incorporating as much of the theory work around F-expressions as I can. For a number of years. I'm getting close to getting it fully-realised into something that is both performant, and shouldn't feel too odd for most programmers, even if they're unfamiliar with stack languages.
That work? Doesn't matter at all. What matters is how my daughter learns to respect herself, and position herself in this world.
I've been known to be drop everything, when she asks me what a Gruffalo is.
by droobles on 12/14/22, 5:51 PM
by jasfi on 12/14/22, 4:59 PM
https://logictrader.xyz - Automated trader, right now for crypto/Binance only, but plans to expand to other crypto exchanges and then stocks. Rules help to stop people making mistakes in trading.
by blockwriter on 12/14/22, 5:36 PM
I went about doing so in my own ways, often ineffectually, but still feeling I was on to something, until the pandemic. Although I found that the surgical extraction of the social life I had managed to cultivate, save for my intimates, whom I still saw, meant that I could not write as I had before, I could continue to work on fostering the environment I felt literature and the writers of literature required in order to thrive. To make a long story short, I began investing in a platform that is meant to augment the process of writing and reading. They are simple tools, but they will be part of a coffeeshop environment, which is already under construction, where I hope commerce and literature can be wed to the benefit of the shop's regular patrons.
On July 4th, I could hear the reports from Central Street in Highland Park, which left six dead. I became obsessed with the tragedy of how suddenly and capriciously death can come, especially in relation to one's spiritual mission, which I feel is often left in a state of disorder, in ways big and small. The notion of completing one's spiritual mission in life, or in maintaining one's spiritual mission in a state of completeness, does not seem without our nature, just as the tendency to maintain its disorder does not seem innate to our nature. To develop the theme of literature in the 21st century and our spiritual life will be a matter to which I apply myself throughout life.
by 082349872349872 on 12/14/22, 2:43 PM
by unintendedcons on 12/14/22, 4:31 PM
Combining the Sudbury Valley School model with the Free Software movement, a democratic makerspace school.
by jcpst on 12/14/22, 4:41 PM
But it's too much. Over time I have been slowly carving out the life I want to live. Cutting out the distractions that are only mildly interesting.
It's down to:
* My family's well-being, which includes myself.
* My music career (composer/songwriter).
* A continual series of actions to keep tipping my work/life balance farther and farther to the "life" side.
* Camping.
by ileitch on 12/14/22, 3:54 PM
by mathgladiator on 12/14/22, 7:51 PM
by Moxdi on 12/14/22, 4:27 PM
personal happiness
by Decabytes on 12/14/22, 3:53 PM
by Glench on 12/15/22, 2:56 AM
by iancmceachern on 12/14/22, 4:02 PM
I design medical devices, have designed many real good ones. But that is just work.
by duringwork12 on 12/14/22, 4:03 PM
by cyberdata on 12/15/22, 9:51 AM
Guiding her so that she becomes a kind, good human being.
by beej71 on 12/14/22, 8:16 PM
by f0e4c2f7 on 12/14/22, 3:29 PM
by icarito on 12/15/22, 1:46 AM
by usgroup on 12/14/22, 7:39 PM
by badpun on 12/14/22, 8:12 PM
by profstasiak on 12/14/22, 4:50 PM
by cableshaft on 12/14/22, 5:03 PM
* I released the original[1] as a flash game on Newgrounds eighteen years ago and it blew up, played millions of times across a bunch of websites
* Worked on a J2ME version for my mobile phone (it worked but never released it, probably should have)
* Worked on a sequel in Flash, then started learning about XNA and being able to put games on Xbox 360 with it, so I used that to learn C# and submitted to a game dev contest Microsoft hosted (and was a finalist in it. They also invited me to be one of the first demos for their Xbox Live Indie Games service - 1 of 8 - and was briefly shown during their keynote address at GDC that year, and was playable at one of their kiosks there. I happened to be at that GDC and got to watch people trying it live, it was surreal). I was at that GDC because the game got me a game producer job in the video game industry for a small publisher.[2]
* Saw iOS starting to blow up and decided to port my sequel to iOS and learn Objective-C and some OpenGL ES at the same time. Did okay but not amazing, I didn't really know how to market it on there, just kind of got lost amongst other games. It's not up there anymore as eventually it wasn't worth keeping up with the required updates. I plan to support an iOS version again with Proximity 3[3]
* Remember when Kindle had games on it? You could apply to be a developer for that, and I did, and I was accepted. I got pretty far along in development (mostly just working on game options and menus still), but got distracted by college just long enough that Active Content was starting to be on its way out, so it never got released.
* Mostly made a Pico-8 version. Once again core gameplay was done, but got distracted at menus. At some point I want to sit down and finish it finally.
* Ported that Pico-8 version to PlayDate in a couple weekends since they are both Lua. Still waiting to receive my PlayDate so I can test it on the device. The graphics are super basic though, since I don't know how to do 2-color graphics well (white/black and dithering), and I'm worried about releasing it without some help there because I'm already seeing some beautiful puzzle games (comparatively) being released on that system.
* Worked together with a friend to make a physical board game and pieces prototype using a laser cutter. Talked to a couple of publishers but most are too hesitant to release a straight abstract game (just hex tiles with colors and numbers), despite its past popularity. Hoping to release a new version out there and maybe that will help them change their mind. Either that or get some other board games designs of mine released, which may convince them to take a chance on it. One other game design is signed and in the publisher's queue (still a ways back, unfortunately).
* Working on Proximity 3 right now, using Monogame. I originally ported my Xbox 360 version of 2 to Monogame, and was just going to clean up and upgrade and add new features to it, but after a while I started getting really annoyed by resolution issues and having to redo art a bunch since it was all 2D art, so I decided to restart from scratch using 3D. Core gameplay loop is done and I've been spending my spare time working on the surrounding interface and options and redesigning some things so that a Twitch streamer can play it along with their viewers via the chat. Hoping to get that into Steam early access within the next 6 months.
* Have an idea for Proximity 4 already that makes the game a lot deeper. I'll probably switch to Unity at that point, because I want to make it VR-compatible.
* I also need to make a new web version at some point, and I'd love for it to have room codes so people can join from anywhere. I'd also love to store the stats in a database and slowly build up a lichess style database of moves.
I work on other games as well, and that's part of the reason why there was such a gap between Proximity 2 and Proximity 3 (over 10 years at this point), because I took a detour to try my hand at designing a bunch of other board games (also I was in the video game industry for a while with companies that had contracts that may not have looked too fondly on new video game releases by me), but I think it's time for a sequel.
[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428