High Effort Jokes?
I learn best by doing, by building stuff and trying out new skills. I often use weird, fun, quick one-off projects to accomplish this. This lead to my concept of learning by implementing High Effort Jokes. The process of which goes roughly as follows:
- I have a (somewhat stupid) fun idea, often a somewhat inside joke for my friends or colleagues
- I think of a way to turn that idea into a mini project
- I think of a skill that I want to learn or improve that could benefit from a fun mini project
- I build and ship said mini project in a couple of days
- ….
- Profit! (mostly for the domain registrars) and go back to step one
Advantages of fun little projects
Of course you could also develop new skills, or improve existing ones, by developing more serious side-projects. For me this didn’t work as well because I would get stressed by the seriousness and never actually finish and ship something. Building silly fun projects that you don’t need to maintain allows me to actually ship stuff which is super usefull for me! I get to learn new skills and make the people around me laugh at the same time, a clear win-win in my book! In some regards this has the same power as game jams. A short deadline and minimal expectations help actually shipping fun little projects! And sometimes you want to work on it further to expand it into something more serious!
Some inspiration
A non-exhaustive list of examples of my work (mostly in chronological order)
| Name | Description | Repository |
|---|---|---|
| funcontrol | cookie clicker style game in the style of the software I work on @ topicus | GitHub |
| glassboard simulator | simulate the annoyances of writing with a chalk pen on a glassboard | GitHub |
| baby poll | web app so we can make bets in our team when babies will be born | GitHub |
| rikroel | AWS Lambda that generates opengraph data to “Rikroel” (think rick roll) my co-workers in slack | GitHub |
| viplife.nl | experiments with “branding” and “merchandise” for the VIPLive teams | GitHub |
| viplife.rip | static page generator to honour the people that leave your team | GitHub 1 GitHub 2 |
| toi.vet | stock ticker page for $TOI.V | GitHub |
| roll credits | end your awkward online meetings by rolling credits! | GitHub |