I love this. What is it about pointless technical projects that are sometimes so alluring? I wonder if it's the removal of secondhand stress since there is no 'meaningful' success criteria.
Yes, I think removing the "must do a thing" component confounds macro-scale sensible classification and measurement of the discrete work that is being done. It's possible for manglement to see that effort is being invested, but the significance of the result cannot be perceived due to lack of resonance with the engineering mindset. This makes it possible to personally take ownership of engineering agency and may be the core reason engineers survive at all because they are able to take and own personal responsibility for their own learning.
Knowing it is not possible for others who don't "get" what we're doing to usefully measure or judge our work in turn disengages the "do thing in anger" stress associated with captive/acute focus, and (in ideal, spherical-cow-like situations providing infinite time) enables unbounded, open-ended introspection into reinforcing the mental solution-finding capacity within the domain in question. (In practice, infinite time would quite harmful as it would provide more space than our attention spans could fill; the practical ideal may be to find the right balance between work (acute focus) and zoning out, which might be trackable by identifying the precise points our ego lags slightly behind, but is cognizant of, our as-yet unused physical capacity.)
Being able to engage in this introspection is critical important for learning: it's almost like dreaming, in absence of any singular focus on finding an optimal solution to a given problem within a limited time frame. This makes it possible to pay attention to the problem-solving network as a whole, cross-reference and merge fragmented ideas that have developed independently, and drift toward blurrier edges of understanding to help reinforce them (ever noticed how the things you instinctively find super interesting that you really want to dive into - and often the itches you want to scratch - all depend on skills that happen to be right at the point of establishing minimum-viable cohesion and fundamentally clicking into place? We wander aimlessly... but we don't!).
Well, another "pointless" project this guy made eventually became a product, the flash synth. It's a tiny synthesizer that fits in a MIDI DIN5 plug. I own one because I love small and weird synths. It actually sounds pretty nice!
Same here, I thought this was great. Even though I have been in the "computer field" for a loong time, there is still so much to learn! I love articles like this.
