#2624S

Today I’m thinking about the fact that I have mixed up “work-like tech” activities with “hobby tech” activities. The distinction isn’t about whether I do something as part of my job or not. Work-like things feel like work, like they have a specific deliverable, like I have a deadline. They can feel like I’m required to do them, to finish them. Hobby things on the other hand feel like play, they engage me directly, not via their goal.

With my changes in work and turmoils in personal life, I haven’t really had time for proper hobby tech things. I’ve had some ideas, sure, but I mostly ended up speccing them and having them built (badly) by AI tools, prompting and testing from my phone, in fragmented moments.

I’ve long wanted to build out a web framework or toolkit for myself that felt fun, that felt like play. It’s been a while since I worked with code properly, directly, so this would need proper, dedicated time. I can’t start this in 15 minute increments, I need to allocate a few hours regularly to refresh my skills and learn new ones.

I have a smallweb instance running on a server, that is a great basis for this kind of dev-play. I’ve set it up precisely with this goal in mind, but then life happened and it’s mostly been used for quick personal tooling projects for my dayjob.

Another aspect is the right personal computer that can feel fun. I mostly do this kind of stuff now on a Linux box, over ssh, so what I mostly need is a device with a good keyboard and decent battery life.
Of course I still have an 11" MacBook Air which would be great for this, except that the OS just gobbles up power, and the aftermarket battery I have in it is good for maybe an hour or so. I’d prefer to stick to an Apple device to retain muscle memory for the keyboard layout, so I can either figure out how to make the OS on the Air more battery friendly, or I can invest in a newer device, maybe a 12" MacBook or an M1 Air.

One more piece of the puzzle is a good way to have documentation in a terminal based environment. Regardless of the client device I use, I’d prefer to keep everything focused on the Linux box, so I’ll need some way to have API and framework and lanugage docs in text files or some similar text-based environment, rather than via the browser.
A simple solution would be to just pull the repos for the docs of each project, since most will have either a docs repo or docs as part of the project repo. A good dedicated solution is dedoc, a terminal based browser for DevDocs.
An alternate approach is using a text-based browser, although I haven’t yet found one that works reliably across modern webpages. elinks might be a good candidate I’m going to try.