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Published in May 2023

I’ve started listening to The Hanselminutes Podcast a couple of years ago. He often talks to interesting people and the conversations are not always just focusing on the technology. This episode is a great example of that.

At his day job, Scott Hanselman is Partner Program Manager at Microsoft. In general, that’s not relevant for his podcast and the guests on his podcasts come from all kinds of companies and backgrounds. However here it might be worth mentioning, as Kris Nóva is actually also working at Microsoft as Principal Engineer at GitHub.

With this out of the way, let’s look at the more interesting things, the stuff they talked about. While I learned quite a bit about the decentralised social network Mastodon and the complexity of running a large Mastodon instance, hachyderm.io, what I found most valuable from this episode was a pretty generic comment about having fun in life 🥳:

“And then when you talk about simpler times, I’m gonna reach down again. This has really brought me a lot of joy. I’ve been building this commode 64, it’s an FPGA reimplementation of a Commodore 64 and a clear acrylic case. And I recently figured out how to get it on the network and then I can turn that into an Azure VM from this in 40 characters. And it’s totally ridiculous. Like, why do I need a 6502 micro processor like brought into Azure because it’s fun and I’m doing all these dumb things, but they bring me so much chill joy.” (Scot Hanselman)

While I’m not much into hardware projects myself, I can see the appeal and actually, this whole site is an example of doing something, just because I enjoy doing it.

I feel like we’ve all gotten ourselves in this big hurry and we’ve all lost touch with the fact that it can just be fun, just like full stop. Like it is okay to do things a little bit wonky or a little bit absurd just because it makes you smile.
And one of the things that I started doing, I got a really good piece of advice earlier this year, which was count your smiles.
If you have observability on anything in your life, it’s how often are you smiling and how much fun are you having each day?
How many mornings do you wake up with a grin on your face?
I realized that there was a lot of things that I was doing in my life and a lot of time I was investing in that just wasn’t contributing to that.”
(Kris Nóva, transcript lightly edited for brevity by me)

I think, at least for me personally, it’s important to do things that make me smile and add fun to my life. Life is not always fun and exciting. But we can try to do our best, to make it more enjoyable for ourselves.

That’s also one of the key reasons, why I started studying wine. I was looking for a project where I could build something, a business in some shape or form, around a topic that brings me joy.

By the time I managed to post this, it looks like at Hachyderm Kris Nóva has been stepping down as admin. However, this does not affect any of the learnings from the podcast. If you want to learn more about Mastodon, you can read the transcript or watch the video.

And I shall probably myself have a closer look at the book “Hacking Capitalism” that was mentioned in the conversation too.

(Prompt for Craiyon to generate the header image: “Simple & maybe stupid things bring real joy to my life. / Exclude: people, faces”)