As a software creation enthusiast, there is an endless number of projects that I would never build, but I can now.

Only in the past month, I scratched a lot of my itches for learning how some systems work, without doing all the tedious work of Kagi+StackOverflow+Build,Test,Run,Repeat that generally would take. I got pretty far with a frontend framework for syncing data from the server, similar to what Zero is building. Made a full voice-to-text-to-llm-to-voice prototype that runs completely local, on a beefy gaming machine. Evaluated the performance and feeling of working with json, protobuf, messagepack, cap’n proto for doing IPC between a go program and a python script. Translated a research project I did not make, from Python to Rust, without really learning to Rust and making sure all tests pass. Creating go bindings for some obscure machine learning C library with little maintenance. Creating a fully featured CoW FUSE driver backed by a PostgreSQL database. Creating cache servers for nix, PyPI, Docker registries, and npm. Testing SSL interception and full cleartext analysis of network logs with a local LLM, for a whole workstation VM.

And that was just the past month. Because now I can. Any of those things in the past would have taken me days or weeks to get to some acceptable state.