trykondev

I released a small game a couple of years ago -- a challenging puzzle game called Omnicube [1].

It was inspired by my time playing competitive chess. I loved the experience of sitting down and solving a book of tactics puzzles. I found it fascinating that the individual movements of each chess piece are quite simple, yet they combine to create really challenging puzzles. With Omnicube I wanted to create a game that had a similar feeling of challenging puzzles derived from simple mechanics. I think it would appeal to a lot of the HN audience!

[1] https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube

I'd recommend something by Ray Bradbury -- one of my favorite short story collections of all time is his "The Illustrated Man".

Also a big fan of Asimov's "Robot Dreams".

Thank you for taking the time to share that warning -- I'm new to this process so it's great for me to have the appropriate amount of caution.

Thanks very much for the input -- definitely saw a lot of the "too good to be true" stuff yesterday as I worked through the listings.

Thank you for weighing in with this perspective -- definitely saw a lot of this yesterday while combing through listings.

This is something I worked on developing in my 20s. For me, what worked was finding an "ethical role model" -- someone who acts ethically and has a good sense of right & wrong -- and trying to model my choices based on what I thought that person would choose. Sometimes this would literally involve asking them "what do you think I should do?" and sometimes I'd just try to infer.

My ethical role model was my younger brother, who is one of the best people I know, and is someone who always seemed to have a good sense of "you shouldn't do that" or "this is the right thing to do, even if it's hard".

I committed to evaluating my decisions based on "what would my brother think of this" and I'm very proud to say that now, in my early 30s, I consider myself to be a very ethical person who does the right thing most of the time, even when it's inconvenient, and even when it's hard. I definitely could not have said that about myself a decade ago.

No idea if that will work for others, but it definitely worked for me!

Thank you so much for the resources! Will definitely check these out. Very helpful to have a couple concrete recommendations for marketplaces that are aligned with my price range -- most of the ones I'd seen previously were 6 figures & up.

Will do -- thanks for the recommendation!

My answer might sound like a joke, but I'm being sincere -- the Adam Sandler movie "Click" had a profound impact on me. I saw that movie in theatres on a total whim when I was a teenager. After watching the movie, I felt extremely emotionally affected -- I literally spent the drive home sobbing.

I felt so moved by how the movie showed time passing by, especially as the main character started to lose control of how quickly time went by. I visualized myself being in the same situation as the main character at the end of the movie -- his entire life having passed by, and this sensation of guilt and regret he must be feeling for not having spent his time in a meaningful way and for having missed things like the last conversation with his father. I imagined the despair the character must have felt at having wasted his life, and then the incredible relief he must have felt when he got a chance to do it over and do it right.

Ever since seeing that movie, I've made an extra effort to remain present in my life, prioritize my family and close friends, and always question whether the way I'm spending my time is meaningful, or if I'm doing things that I'll one day look back on and feel regret. This movie made me confront what it would feel like to look back on my life and evaluate my choices, and consequently it helped me see what's important to me in life.

I spend about 4-6 hours a day (M-F) in meetings or doing focused work, and probably another hour or so per day doing less taxing things like organizing my notes & responding to emails.

I've definitely had busier times throughout my career where I've worked 50-60 hours a week, and I know others who work those hours pretty regularly, so OP's schedule is "normal" for some situations or types of people -- but definitely taxing enough to cause burnout and not a schedule I'd recommend maintaining long term if there's any way to reduce those hours.

I agree with the other responses in this thread suggesting that you can really only get ~4 hours of focused work done in a day.

OP, if you can cut some of your low-impact hours where you're working but not really getting much done, that's probably a good place to start.

I'd happily take a 60% paycut if I could instead work full time directing my independent game development company.

Over the past few months I've been consciously reducing my time spent on news sites/reddit/social media. It's been a huge benefit to my available time & overall level of focus, but that change has definitely left me craving some more legitimate & compelling articles to read and I've been feeling a bit "out of the loop". The Economist sounds like a wonderful recommendation & I've just subscribed based on reading your comment -- thanks so much for the suggestion!

I do! I started one in the summer of 2013. I originally started it as a way to aggregate links & helpful information for my game development endeavors, but it eventually evolved into more of a recounting of what I did or how I was feeling on a particular day. I now have daily entries for the entire time period since I started it, and I consider my journal to be one of my most treasured possessions. Sometimes I'll get busy and not add entires for a few days at a time, but I always go back and at least put a one-liner of why I was too busy to write anything.

I've found it to be a slightly more structured & useful way to essentially interact with my own brain -- it's a place for me to vent, a place to record not-so-important but still fun-to-have memories, to keep notes & sort out plans for the future.

It's a lot of fun to be able to scroll back and say "hey, what did we do for my birthday three years ago?" :) It's also fun at times like new year's to flip back through my journal and remind everyone what they listed for a resolution last year.

This is really neat -- I would absolutely love an NFL equivalent!

Yes I have -- I found my favorite job of my entire career on HN!

I started my computer science degree the year I turned 20!

I'd previously been studying in the biological sciences, and although I really enjoyed learning the material, I dreaded actually doing the practical labs & real-world applications. The practical applications of computer science, in contrast, excited me greatly. So I switched degrees and fell in love with my new field.

Now, just three months before my 30th birthday, I feel incredibly happy, lucky, grateful, and relieved to have made the switch. My career in software has been such a joy. I could so easily have ended up spending the past decade being miserable in a field that I didn't enjoy. I think switching into computer science was the best decision I've ever made.

Thank you for sharing -- these are great. I'm always impressed with this style of tutorial which distills a useful lesson into a single image or GIF. These are very clear, interesting, and informative!

There is another game studio that I've been following which does a good job with this tutorial technique as well (Couch Game Crafters). One great example of their work demonstrates creating a shader for animating the visual effect of a toaster moving through a cartoonish pipe [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/CouchGameCraft/status/100797028441722470...

I've directly found two jobs through HN, so already that's a massive benefit for me. Aside from that, I feel it's given me a much better grasp of both the breadth and depth of the tech industry.

I have a suggestion which might be something of interest to you -- I work part-time at a company that specializes in conducting remote technical interviews as a service. It pays pretty well ($100 USD per 90-minute interview) -- the work is very flexible and you set your own hours. It might be a good option for you if you're interested in putting in a few extra hours each week, and it also might be a great fit in the sense that you don't have to spend time hunting down projects and instead can just schedule a few extra hours in your availability calendar when you want more work.

Although it's not a traditional software development job, I've found it to be a welcome change of pace to have a job that is separate from the stress of maintaining a codebase or crafting software all day which I find can be pretty draining.

If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.

This is a beautiful project. I still remember the night before a "show and tell" event at my school when I was eight years old. I laid out all my toys on my bed and tried to choose which one to bring to school the next day. I felt such excitement at the prospect of telling my friends all about the games I played with them.

I remember having such love for my toys and when I think of them I can still feel the joy they brought me. I admit that scrolling through these pictures today has me feeling pretty emotional.

This is a really cool idea -- though to be honest, I would have some reservations depending on what the "courses" entail.

The biggest thing that I would look for in a freelancer is demonstrable experience doing the particular thing I'm hiring for. For example, if I want someone to help me implement a game using the Unity game engine, I'd look at the freelancer's body of work of past Unity projects. I would be very hesitant to work with someone who is learning Unity for the first time using your platform because that would imply they have no prior experience using that technology.

It sounds like your courses are intended as a way to validate a freelancer's knowledge -- almost more like a test or certification than a course. I see in another thread that you intend to have users upload a previously completed project, which could be a great way to check their past work, but then I'm a bit confused as to why they would then need a course.

So I guess I feel a bit confused about what I should expect from the people completing the courses -- will these people be freelancers with experience and the courses are just validating that? Will they be freelancers with no prior experience in a particular technology, and they're learning it for the first time via your site? Will it be a mix of all of the above?

I think a focus on validating freelancer's existing skills would probably give the most useful data for the folks that are trying to hire them.

I totally agree. Just this year I bought a new computer and chose a refurbished 2015 MBP based almost entirely on the keyboard.

I've been working 100% remotely for the past three years. I guess the specific challenges depend a bit on the nature of your work -- I used to struggle a lot with feeling isolated when I was doing more pure development work, but my job now (technical interviewing) requires a lot of video chat so I'm getting lots of face-to-face communication with teammates and candidates, and I rarely feel isolated or lonely.

The downside to having lots of video chat is that I'm really constrained to working from somewhere with good internet, and somewhere without a lot of ambient noise -- which somewhat ruins the "work from anywhere" appeal. It's definitely a trade-off I can live with, though.

Aside from those things, I'm honestly struggling to really come up with something that sucks about remote work. My experience with being fully remote has been fantastic and has brought so much more joy to my career.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply -- I really enjoyed the article, and several of the points you mention are already resonating with me, even at this early stage in the process!

I'm kind of cheating with this answer because it's not a specific piece of tech, but the thing that I'm really focused on learning right now is how to build out my business by hiring developers & learning how to properly manage them as they help contribute to some of my company's projects.

Most of my development work has been solo, with occasional one-off help from contractors. But the number and scope of my projects has been growing and I've been struggling to keep up, so I'm now going through my first round of finding people to hire, designing a fair & useful interview process, and figuring out the best way to break down my current projects so that it's minimally painful for a new developer to ramp up on them.

This process has also forced me to actually start looking for a legitimate source of funding for my business, besides my own savings. I've been trying to learn this side of things, but it's been a real struggle -- I've definitely been living in the bubble of focusing on my product without thinking about the business side of things for too long, and I'm finally making the leap in terms of taking the business side of things seriously.

Any words of encouragement or advice are greatly appreciated :)

Last year I released Omnicube, a really hard block-sliding puzzle game set on a talking cube in space. I initially released it for Windows & Mac, and now I'm working on redesigning the UI to make it more appropriate for mobile devices.

The game mechanics are very well-suited for mobile devices (click & drag to move blocks), but the puzzle grids are 14x14 and with the surrounding UI in its current form, the screen is a bit too busy and it makes it difficult to click on the block you want to click on using touch controls on smaller screens like a phone. So I'm trying to create a simplified UI in preparation for releasing the game on mobile.

The game is currently available for PC & Mac on Steam[1], itch.io[2], and the Windows Store[3]. I'm sure there are some puzzle aficionados here on HN, and I would be delighted if you'd check it out!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/800860/Omnicube

[2] https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/omnicube/9njcwkrx4mm...

It was challenging at first but you are definitely right that once you do it consistently for (maybe a month or so), it becomes a lot less taxing.

And yes -- a big part of the appeal is definitely the flexibility in terms of hours & location. It's been such an improvement to my quality of life to find a fully remote job.

Yep, that's correct -- 60 minute interview and 30 minute writeup summarizing & scoring the interview. There is actually a surprising amount of work in this space, at least at the company I'm working for -- I usually try to do a maximum of 10 interviews a week to leave time for my game development pursuits, but there are lots of other folks who do more than that & use it as a full time job.

The type of interviewing I'm involved in is mostly first-round technical screens -- the standard interview format is about 10-15 minutes discussing the candidate's prior work and the remainder of the time on a live coding exercise.

It's a lot of fun -- I always enjoyed solving & working on "interview-style" problems more than the actual enterprise software projects I'd build at work. So it's definitely been a game-changer to discover this field.

I went through a potentially similar experience as you, where I was feeling a bit burned out on writing software. There were other things I wanted to pursue like writing fiction, but I didn't necessarily have the budget to focus on it full-time.

I transitioned into working in a field that still leverages my technical skills, but in a different way -- I conduct technical interviews. It's been a really healthy change for me in a number of ways -- in addition to getting some face-to-face communication with real human beings & improving my interviewing/interpersonal skills, it's also given me the chance to work remotely and pursue the other things that interest me. And I've found it to be a huge relief to have a job that is separate from the stress of maintaining a codebase or crafting software all day which I found to be pretty draining.

The company I work for in this space pays well ($100 USD per 90-minute interview). If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.

Wow, what an incredible journey you're embarking on. Congratulations to you -- I'm vicariously thrilled and terrified as I read this post :)

Regarding consistent income, one of the companies I work for offers part-time, fully remote contractor work conducting technical interviews. I use it as a way to keep a stable income while I pursue riskier ventures outside of that company and a lot of the folks working on the platform have very young families. I plan to use it as my sole income when I start a family of my own. It might be a good fit for you since it sounds like you'd want to continue doing your own contract work.

It pays $100 USD per 90-minute interview -- if this type of thing is interesting to you (or anyone reading, for that matter) -- feel free to send me an email! Details are in my profile.