I do find that it helps with motivation to work on stuff that’s useful, and of course, it is much more rewarding when you do actually get it to be of use to someone.

But yeah, it can be difficult to balance. I’ve had hobby projects where I would spend weeks banging my head against them, because I wanted them to do $USEFUL_THING, which I only slowly realized was probably not actually doable in any reasonable time frame.

Or other projects, which started out explicitly as a bullshit project and then it kind of grows on me and then I have to rewrite it, because my game engine stops being maintained …twice, and yeah, that just starts to become work to keep your toy project alive.

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I hate making useless stuff.

Who has time for that.