x86hacker1010

For years I’ve built random projects that die out or go nowhere, mostly so I can learn some new tech.

This is draining without coding for some purpose. How do I find this purpose? The most passionate hobby I have is coding, but feeling lost in figuring out what to build.

I've decided it's a good time for me to focus on some practical fundamentals that aren't discussed in too much detail in uni. I've been reading a lot about networking, doing some coding in C and Rust and tackling some low-level things like programs dealing with TCP sockets, DNS, HTTP packets, etc. It wasn't really until doing this type of thing along with self-hosting my own stuff where things at a macro-level really started to click.

Anyone else have these aha moments in their career? It makes large sections of CS become much less intimidating when you actually get down and say..

"ok here is a packet, it's just bytes over a TCP socket... with a bit of bit twiddling, I can make these standards come to life."

While I did some of these things in uni, it was all very rushed. I don't feel I had the mind for these ideas to sink in so early in my engineering career. Maybe I would have if we did some really practical, hands-on things.

Books I've loved:

- Nand2Tetris

- Unix a History & Memoir

- Rust Documentation

- Distributed Services in Go

- Beej Guide to Networking/Sockets

- Code

Life is pretty absurd and wonder more and more why we put so much stake into a job when the employer effectively doesn't care about you.

Anyone taking some time to do cool stuff?