I have a hobby

When people ask me about my hobby, I never really know what to say. I play video games or read a book every now and then, but I wouldn’t really consider those to be my hobbies or passions. To me, a cool hobby is something like making music or practicing karate.

Turning a Hobby into a Career?

I’ve realized that working on my personal web projects—like this website—is much more of a hobby for me. I’ve been doing this since I was about twelve years old. Now it’s also my job as an employee at a company. Since then, my activity on my own projects has slowed down considerably, but it’s never stopped. I keep working on things whenever I feel like trying something specific, like revamping the design for the umpteenth time—whether minimally or radically—or switching to a different technology. For example, when I migrated my blog from WordPress to Eleventy and now from Eleventy to Astro. It’s very liberating that I can let loose here and don’t have to meet anyone else’s expectations.

Benefits as a Nice Side Effect

Smaller projects are always fun, too, like my card game Skip it!, which my mom likes to play on her phone from time to time, or the Secret Santa app, which has made the run-up to Christmas easier for our family in recent years. Or when, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to help save SP-Studio (I was a big fan of the original myself) and migrate it from Flash to React.

Zero-Burnout Policy

Right now, my project is to continue expanding this new website next.lgk.io. I deliberately don’t set any deadlines for myself; instead, I only do as much as I feel like doing at any given time. Actually, my hobby is very similar to playing video games. Sometimes there’s frustration when you get stuck somewhere, there are moments of triumph when you finally make progress, and in the end, you even have a finished “creation” that you can show off.