I'd add to that, sometimes people could get going faster if they really tried, but they're just a bit lazy or burnt out and need a rest. So they say OK, I've finally got an hour of free time, but I'll just check Hacker News first, check my email, read this article... and now they only have 20 minutes of work time left.

Whereas a few people either don't need so much time to recharge, or they just push themselves into getting started anyway, and usually once you actually start working it's not so hard to continue.

Getting enough sleep helps a lot with motivation to work. Although then you have less time! So I'll just stay up late this one time and get this thing done...

It also depends on what standards of productivity you aim for, and who you compare with. Many people say I do lots of stuff when comparing to themselves, and I feel unproductive 'cause I'm comparing to myself 5 years ago, working 14 hours/day.

I should try to get into The Flow faster (maybe leaving notes of what to do next when finishing a task? --and removing twitter and similar..)

Anyway, finding a good balance between family and work time is extremely difficult for me, one of my biggest endeavors, even after 3 years of parenthood.

https://github.com/GlowstoneMC/Glowstone

It even works well as the server backend for my NetCraft client, which is based on fogleman's Craft. The support plugin WebSandboxMC provides a WebSocket client for the web client to connect to, and it runs well on the Glowstone server, compatibility with Glowstone being a top goal.

So with these projects you can have both an open source client and server talking to each other, the full stack open source. The downside, of course, is neither are complete, but it is a start. Open source can only get better (contributions certainly welcomed).

Another project I'd recommend for those in the market for an open source server is Cuberite. It is written in C++ and supports plugins written in Lua. Also has a very active developer community, maybe slightly bigger than Glowstone. Last year I added Forge handshake support, so modded clients with Forge can connect send their mod list, while server plugins can register certain mods as required. Not full Forge mod support, but a necessary prerequisite. The downside of Cuberite is, without Java support, it doesn't have compatibility with Bukkit or Spigot plugins, so there is a vastly smaller ecosystem of plugins available, unlike Glowstone which can use many of them no problem.

Either way, both Glowstone and Cuberite servers, and Craft-based clients (shameless plug for NetCraft/WebSandboxMC), are very exciting and promising projects in my opinion. Personally I have not contributed to either recently, seeing this post I'm tempted to pick them up again, yet for better or worse I've moved onto other things. I'm certainly rooting for them to keep up their open source momentum, could turn into something very cool!

For anyone interested, last year I've taken fogleman's Craft and ported it to run in the browser using WebAssembly and emscripten: https://satoshinm.github.io/NetCraft/. It can be used with a Bukkit plugin to provide an interactive web-based interface to (a small section of) the world in Minecraft server. Have not worked on it recently, but could be a fun project to develop further, for all the open source contributors out there. I tried to merge most of the open pull requests and other forks of Craft, but life has gotten in the way...

Find that, and you already have the itch+curiosity+motivation+rationale+justification (mostly the itch) to just jump in somewhere.

[NB. Mis-typed Netflix, then left it in.]

I'm guessing this is the fundamental difference.

(Of course this means that one is probably not always going to do "production ready" things, but it's for fun, so it doesn't really matter. Sometimes it's fun to just go nuts and sprinkle "undefined"[1] all over the code base and just go from types to implementation as fast as humanly possible.)

[1] This is a Haskellism, but basically means any of:

    assert(false)
    throw new NotImplementedException(...)
    ???
    etc.

Thanks for all the inspiration, keep it up.

Aside, yes there are a lot of false notions going around and good to have engineers like you to prove otherwise!

You're literally an example of a "10x". I have a similar experience --- it doesn't feel like you're doing a lot, but the vast difference becomes noticeable if you compare. You can get more things done in a day than others can in a week. That's just your natural ability. Enjoy it.

Looks like you can focus well and have stamina.

How do you keep motivated doing such a project for fun in your spare time?

Do you work 40h/week?

So far I have 18 b8 c4 23 86 1b 9c 60 f6 ec b0 (...11 octets...?), and I'm not sure what to do with them.

You could spend an hour skimming stones on a lake with a kid and never talk to them and you wouldn't be 'spending time with them' in that sense.

Or you could spend an hour teaching them how to skim a stone, or the science behind why stones skim, or make up a skimming competition, etc.

The point being you can make anything you do into a bonding/learning experience if you try.

Are there similar studies about whether playing Legos with your child creates a bond? What about baseball?