[code_scrapping]

Hi Carl,

purely judging from your profile picture it seems that you're about half my age :) and I think it's excellent that you're doing a bunch of things - personal blog, linux, tutorial post... Just remember - most of the guys around here tend to do it for marketing reasons (i.e. we want to find a job and we're advertising our capabilities), and those projects might not be the most interesting things out there.

Bottom line is - just because everybody else is doing it, might be because they have different motives than you, and I hope you'll do/build firstly what's interesting and fun, and secondly what's financially viable.

Good luck, have fun!

[carltheperson]

I'm 18 (:

Thank you so much for the heads up. I'm only doing this because it's fun! I love using Linux and I feel like I learned a ton from this.

[jvanderbot]

At what point did the smiley face reverse? It seems anyone under 24-ish uses (: where as I know it as :)

[colonwqbang]

Many services will auto-translate :) into something else, like a colourful unicode icon. If you prefer to keep your smiley looking like just a smiley, (: is an effective workaround.

[NoodleIncident]

There's also an upside-down emoji smiley with its own distinct mood. Hopefully services don't start translating (: into that, they're used quite differently!

https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-upside-down-face/

[adembudak]

> tac "(:"

> :)

[saagarjha]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone using (:, and I'm a bit younger than 24-ish :)

[darkwater]

I remember (: being used by left-handed in the late '90s, but maybe it was just the people I knew that used it for that reason.

[thebruce87m]

And when did the nose fall off too?

[nurb]

Nose does not carry any facial expression information, so there is no need for it.

[newnamenewface]

I blame reddit for this one. :^) needs to be escaped for else the mouth floats away.

[zem]

:-) was the standard smiley-with-nose, :^) was a lot rarer

[themodelplumber]

IMO monospace fonts can make the nose look ridiculous, but for other fonts I leave it in so the face is easier to read as a face.

[smlckz]

being slightly younger than you, i can not but envy you: i have done zero projects or had fun like you have had. hmm.

[log101]

Envy = Desire, I'm sure you'll do similar side-projects soon!

[saagarjha]

Sounds like you've still got some time to do some projects for fun and be like him?

[dj_mc_merlin]

I got hired at (probably about his age?) just due to side projects like this. If nothing, it shows motivation. So it's got a marketing reason nonetheless.

[CryptoGhost]

Isn't this the programmer equivalent of one of those old stories "just go talk to the manager and give him a firm handshake." All the recent research in hiring seems to point to trends that white board / hackerrank / leetcode style filtering are up and someone with hiring authority actually looking at a portfolio or code repo at an all time low.

[saagarjha]

Getting things on the front page of Hacker News remains a good way to get people to contact you. Source: have had people contact me with job-related things for that reason.

[mod]

Just a couple days ago I was going through all kinds of things I made when I was 18. That was almost 20 years ago, and I had VB6 projects and a blog (we called them E/N sites, the word blog wasn't coined yet). The VB6 projects were AOL "progs"--things that interacted with AOL chat, mostly. For the blog, I started with html, then .shtml (server-side-includes), then discovered php. Built a whole CMS using flatfiles, which was the only thing I knew, then rebuild with a database...

I have full source of ALL of that!

I also discovered linux in that time, and one post mentioned running Mandrake 7.2--which I doubt was the first version I ran.

Those skills eventually turned into jobs. And some of my peers who were doing the same thing turned into lifelong, important friendships.

Anyway, just reminiscing. I had more fun computing in those few years than I've had in the whole time since. And even though it was for fun, it was easily some of the best-spent time in my life for $$$ in the future.