A few months ago I came alone this tweet:
As a web developer, you have 3 non-electronic hobbies you can choose from:
— Andrew Schmelyun (@aschmelyun) July 26, 2020
Woodworking
Gardening
Biking
That's it, sorry I don't make the rules
And I have two things to say:
- I would have added guitar and cooking to the list.
- Besides that, you are absolutely correct, random person on the internet.
Hobbies as a Developer
As a developer, I hang around many other fellow developers. It really seems that our hobbies are narrowed down to a list of 4-5 things. The most went for the cooking hobby, a very good one in my opinion. A few went for the guitar, I actually think they started from the guitar and then continue to do the development stuff. Anyway, they are very good at that.
I hear in the hallway some people that bike and everyone have something to do with gardening.
I tried playing the guitar for a considerable amount of time. Such a considerable amount of time you would think I could play something on the guitar, but I can’t. It was really frustrating and I left the guitar for better hobbies.
As you probably guessed from my blog I love cooking and it is definitely one of my more time consuming hobbies. But it’s not the only one! As much as I would like to tell you I love biking and it is a very good sport for me, I don’t do that. I love gardening and woodworking.
Gardening
I’ve already talked a bit about my gardening hobby. If there is anything better than having a hobby, is connecting that hobby to other hobbies or even to your main job. In my “garden” (it’s a porch, ok?) I have basil, green onions, parsley and mint. I have some flowers, too. They are all connected to my automatic watering system and they are all alive!
Besides being a green hobby (pun intended) and a great addition for my cooking hobby, the ease of connection to the development world and the amount of possibilities in it, got me hooked up from the beginning.
I know nothing about plants
And yet, they are still alive and very tasty 🙂
Woodworking
This time I’m not talking about this kind
Another hobby I strongly recommend is woodworking. This one is a bit harder as you’ll need more equipment and room for it. I know 1-2 people that took this as their main hobby and I can’t tell you how much I envy them.
One of the reasons I recommend woodworking is that as a developer you tend to sit down on the computer for many hours and you don’t really do stuff with your body. Your hands are all hand-creme soft, your back is a mess and, if you are like me, you don’t really want to do sport. Woodworking is not a sport, but it does make you move and use your muscles a bit.
A more important reason is that you make stuff! What’s better than actually making something out of a pile of junk?
The first thing I made (really built) is a “Shots Shelf”. I have near 50 shots from around the world (this is another hobby we developers do, right? We collect stuff) and they were all sitting on normal shelves. Then, one birthday, my girlfriend got us a wood-workshop lesson and we made this:
Now it looks like this:
It was very satisfying.
This wood-workshop brought me back to my early years when I would saw and nail wood to make things and really enjoyed that. The next thing I did was to find my next project.
As a beer homebrewer I have many empty beer bottles hanging around. I wanted something that would organize them and keep them clean, so I built this rack:
After this, I wanted an even bigger challenge. A stool. But not a simple stool, a special stool. So I searched the internet (Pinterest is a very good option) and found some cool examples. I downloaded SketchUp which is free for a month to try and sketch how I want my stool to look like. This is what I sketched:
And this is how it looks like today:
It’s not finished yet, but soon it will be.
The purpose of this post is not (only) to show you the stuff I did but to encourage you to find a hobby and stick with it. I’m pro everything that opens your mind to new things and introduces you to new worlds. There are great communities built around anything today, so you won’t find yourself clueless nor stuck irrelevant to what you are doing.
Finding and working on a hobby is one of the best ways to invest in yourself and that is what really matters.
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