My father worked with his hands for his entire working life; at the time, he tells me, he worked on the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle more than anyone else (such as replacing the entire decking, etc). It's something that he's extremely proud of and something he can actually show his grandchildren.

On the other hand, I build things that are, for the most part, abstract and virtual. I enjoy what I do because it allows me to be creative using technologies and tools that I enjoy working with. (And I really enjoy building entire applications from scratch, so much so that I will be creating businesses to really scratch my itches.)

I'm proud that an application that I built half a decade ago is still being used. But, for the most part, most of my work has a limited life-span. Is that so bad?

I think that the example of a military sailing vessel (!) shows that almost everything people build with their hands has a limited life-span, too.

In many cases the lifespan is longer, but in other cases it's shorter. My malloc() is older than my car, even though they both still get regularly used.

I had a poster of that ship on my wall for about 10 years. It's beautiful. Your dad should be very proud.

You should learn how to work with your hands as well. There are a lot of similarities to programming, and the things you make will last your lifetime.

That's pretty much it.

I'm one of those guys who comes to Hacker News, reviews what others have built, and immediately thinks 2 things:

  - That is so cool!
  - So what?

Like most others, I love playing around with widgets and technology just for fun and to see what happens. But the satisfaction from this is usually short lived.

I liken playing around with techology to running around and having lots of good sex with strangers. It's fun and it feels great, but sooner or later, you'll want something more substantial. For me, that requires the satisfaction of others. (This applies to both programming and sex.)

I build things that can help others have sex with strangers. I can quite clearly remember the first time someone came up and told me they were getting married because of my spare-time project.

My first big side project was that; I have received over a 1000 cards/mails/etc of people who are married and/or have babies because of that side project I created with my wife on vacation on the canary islands. We expected it wouldn't get more than a handful of members, but it had 10.000 after a few months and kept growing. Very satisfying feeling for something just built for fun.

Link please ?