I’m speed-running a bunch of new hobbies to teach myself how to make a physical game (basically its a ping pong paddle that tracks how often you hit a ball — like a “keepy uppy” game with scorekeeping):

- Arduino dev and circuitry

- 3D printing

- PCB design

- Woodworking

Its all a lot of fun and IMO a lot more approachable than it has been thanks to the assist from LLMs.

Same, I recently got into Arduino so i could build a toy idea I had for my kid (a sort of "keepy-uppy" paddle game). I've always avoided Arduino projects because I don't like to code in my spare time (its my day job) and also learning how to wire things seemed daunting -- LLMs solved both of those problems for me (Claude's wiring tutorials are awesome and the code is simple enough that it can one-shot it).

I also bought a Bambu A1 3D Printer and it is unexpectedly way more fun and useful than I thought it would be. I designed the toy in TinkerCAD and it printed out beautifully (I also have been printing out lots of other toys and yes, useful things for around the house and for other projects).

Next steps are learning Fusion 360 and figuring out PCBs -- That also seemed daunting to me but its nice to see other amateur hobbyists are seemingly picking it up with not much difficulty.

I highly recommend the "learn fusion 360 in 20 days" series on YouTube. I think I did it pretty causally in half that time. Then just find excuses to design stuff. After about a year of random projects, I can pretty proficiency draw most simple assemblies. This morning my son broke the battery hatch on his favorite toy and within an hour I had a replacement printed. (ducktape would have certainly been faster but where's the fun in that ;)

One thing I would point out is if your interested in organic shapes that blender is the better tool to learn/use. Fusions surface modeling is pretty hard to work with.

There’s a good recent book series about this by Daniel Suarez called Delta V (in the first book they process regolith from an asteroid; in the second book its on the moon; presumably the unreleased third book is on Mars).

For us the killer feature is being able to build the UI once with design tokens and then transform it radically into different themes. In our case the themes serve different brands (of the media company I work for) but more commonly this is a great way to build out light and dark modes.

Our tokens are integrated into the designer’s tooling and we have a build pipeline that allows them to update the frontend with minimal developer supervision, which has been a huge time saver and QoL improvement for both developers and designers.

> Our tokens are integrated into the designer’s tooling and we have a build pipeline that allows them to update the frontend with minimal developer supervision, which has been a huge time saver and QoL improvement for both developers and designers.

Like did you integrate into figma, or write a gui for them, or something else?

We use a Figma plugin called Tokens Studio, which stores its source of truth a (a big JSON file) in our github repo. Designers manage all of the token values there and push updates to a branch and create their own pull requests which developers then do a minimal review on. Long story short, the tokens are converted to CSS variables, which we consume in our styles (we use Vanilla Extract which makes this very nice). The tokens in Token Studio can also be used in the Figma designs, but its a little clunky.

Figma recently launched their own native solution (called Figma Variables) which is more slick and better integrates into the design tooling, but it is mostly locked behind an enterprise-level plan (which lots of folks aren't happy about)

It definitely does but not completely. You are probably going to be totally smitten with your kid and spending time with them, even if its something "boring" is going to be really enjoyable. Unfortunately, your kid can sometimes be a brat (or at least mine is sometimes, but I'd guess a lot are!) and then these activities that are good for them can feel like a chore.

I definitely like having my own space and at least with one kid, I'm still getting plenty of it. But the time I spend with her is incredibly rewarding (most of the time ;)

I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.

I think its because the user is newly created (i.e., green username).

I haven't seen beer that low, but here in Ontario a number of breweries started offering beer around the 3% mark. I really can't handle anything much above 5, and these are good breweries offering a nice alternative from their usual boozy, hoppy IPAs.

Of course, a lot of American beers are around that percentage point, but the ones I'm talking about are a bit higher quality in my opinion :)

> Of course, a lot of American beers are around that percentage point, but the ones I'm talking about are a bit higher quality in my opinion :)

Don't worry, it's usually only the worst American beers that end up exported outside the US, and unfortunately this seems to go both ways between every pair of beer-producing regions I've been to. You can't even find a decent selection of German beers here (~50km away) in Switzerland, let alone ones from local American/Canadian/... breweries which are rare exceptions at this point. The same seems to be true of Canadian beer quality in the US, even in neighboring states like Michigan which at least had some Canadian options.

Me too man -- It is isolating. My superiors are generally helpful but my reports (who were previously my peers that I got along with personally) expect a lot from me now and it's hard to figure out exactly what/how I should deliver.

My daughter had the same score and experience two months ago. Scariest moment of my life -- But all is well now thanks to some amazing, fast moving doctors.