Ask HN: What are your hobbies?
How do you spend your free time? Is it rewarding? At this point in my life, I would say I have two hobbies; Music and Netflix. While I don't play in any bands currently, I have in the past and definitely want to again. In the meantime, I keep a guitar within arms reach at all times and frequently noodle while doing all sorts of things. I also mix the entire production for my local church. Sometimes I mix FOH, other times I mix a separate feed for the livestream online from the back. It's a decent sized production with 1 or 2 guitars, drums, 2 keyboards, percussion, violin, bass, and anywhere between 4-8 singers with microphones. On occasion we also have a choir of 30~ people. I also used to do a lot of home recording, but living in apartments in recent years has made that tough since my tube amps sound best at higher volumes. I don't know if I should be ashamed or embarrassed about my other "hobby", but I watch a stupid amount of Netflix/Twitch/YouTube on a daily basis. Easily 3+ hours a day. In recent weeks, I have even taken up playing my guitar along to the music in movies/tv shows, matching up the key and noodling to whatever is playing in the background. That drives my wife crazy and is probably the reason she doesn't sit and watch with me. I don't know why I watch so many videos, besides boredom, but I would like to find something more productive to do. It used to be writing code, but I quickly got burnt out after landing my first full time development job. After going remote it got even worse. I often wonder if getting out of the house to code would be more productive, but I can't justify the expense yet of a co-working space. Man tell me about it. The reason I asked this question was because I'm feeling like I'm spending way too much time on YouTube. I'm even completely aware that some of the things I watch are really just trash. I like to grow plants from seeds. It's a pretty damn cheap hobby. One of my favorite sites for seeds is rareseeds.com Also ham radio/SDR. Been learning piano slowly, which is fun. I've been doing some simple lock picking - tons of fun, pretty cheap. Knot tying is kind of similar and even cheaper. 3d printing is also an amazing hobby. Also getting into MAME and classic arcade games is cool. I started learning Guitar specifically because I was spending all my time in front a screen. It's helped a bit, but a I also spend a ton of time watching guitar YouTube tutorials to learn things. How are you learning Piano? Are you self taught? I'm learning Guitar from Justin Guitar and the quality of the instruction blows me away. I'm teaching myself with a combination of books (Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course) and youtube videos. My favorite part is just learning the music theory, there's something really relaxing about practicing chords and scales. It's a nice experience to start as a complete beginner at something. In case anyone cares: programming, downhill biking, frisbee golf, Rubiks "cubing" and photography. I get to enjoy all of these hobbies alone or in a group and without a fixed schedule! At least for me these are very rewarding, but sadly you cannot cheat your way to progress to more difficult challenges. Anyway it is quite obvious or measurable what you can and cannot do, and you learn how to learn new skills. In addition to the obvious reading books, enjoying music, and taking pictures of interesting people, my main hobby is dabbling with embedded programming and hardware-devices. I started with arduino, and later moved to other (similar) boards with onboard wifi which makes them more useful. I'm typing this while a small radio I assembled is playing Radio Rock (Helsinki station), and can be controlled wirelessly from my PC, phone, or tablet. Thinking how to solve problems, no it's addictive and you cannot stop when you want. It's pure bullshit.