Building Software For Fun

Time and time again, I have come across articles about writing “useless” software, or programming as play. These sort of articles always wake up something in me. They focus on programming as a fun, playful thing, instead of making things with a hard purpose.

They remind me of the time I made a few experiments for fun. I should do that kind of programming again: fun programming. I have some of those linked in my more page. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be web programming either. Just fun, with fun things.

Here’s a list of some of these things I have come across that are just fun:

• 🖱️ Pointer Pointer is a website that shows a picture pointing to the place where your cursor is pointing at. I’m not even sure how they do it, but it’s just fantastic.
• 🔊 Wave Share is a serverless, peer-to-peer, local file sharing through sound using WebRTC. The “sound” part is what makes it quite fun. Try it out!
• 🤖 WinGPT is an AI assistant for Windows 3.1. That’s quite an old thing. When building such things for such ancient software you also come across problems, like how to implement TLS/SSL on a 16-bit Windows.
• 📁 AT Protocol Repository Browser is a… well… browser for an AT Protocol repository. You can navigate through your own “profile” and see all the “files”, just as if it were a directory on your computer.
• 🧸 DNS Toys lists some arguably useful tools using DNS. When are you going to need to roll a dice using dig? Well, it is possible. It is fun.

Maybe I should do stuff like this, just for fun. I think I get in my head very easily on having to do things with a very specific purpose that need to be useful for other people.