Why Hobbyist Programmers Build Quirky Projects: From Canvas Fish to Web OS

During a weekend browsing online, I came across several quirky projects created by foreign programmers.

The first project lets you draw a fish and watch it swim together with other users' fish.

After drawing, the fish can swim alongside other players' fish, a simple yet popular idea that sparked lively discussion on Hacker News.

I tried my best to draw a fish, only to be told there was only a 30% chance it would be a fish. Too cruel.

I’d love to see how you actually coded it because the fish tank looks really cool.

This is fascinating. I wonder if other animals have similar pages.

One piece of professional advice suggested adding this code to prevent dragging:

canvas.addEventListener('dragstart', (e) => { e.preventDefault(); } );

The second project is a wooden pixel display built over six years. The creator describes it as "laughably" small—only 40 × 25 pixels, capable of drawing ten pixels per minute.

The device uses 40 small wooden blocks on 25 thin shelves, painted and controlled by a Raspberry Pi, Python, and a CNC controller.

After completing the toy, the creator opened it to the world, allowing anyone to submit images or draw their own pictures via a website.

Popular submissions are rendered by the machine and streamed live.

The third project recreates the Lisa GUI—a historic Apple graphical interface—as a JavaScript‑based web operating system.

This web OS mimics the vintage look and feels, and it has also attracted enthusiastic discussion on Hacker News.

This is exactly what I’ve been dreaming of—delicious native JavaScript plus the deep, early‑era Lisa GUI. Awesome!

It runs surprisingly well on mobile devices, though I suspect the random‑puzzle game may generate unsolvable puzzles.

The design and practical tricks are inspiring; I love the jagged font that retains a calligraphic texture beyond typical GUI capabilities.

These projects have little commercial value, yet they thrive because of personal interest and the joy of creation.

Historical examples illustrate this: Linus Torvalds built Linux “just for fun,” Rasmus Lerdorf’s CGI scripts evolved into PHP, and Yukihiro Matsumoto created Ruby to combine Perl’s convenience with Smalltalk’s elegance.

Another example is mitousa’s “puter,” a web‑based desktop built with Node.js, vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and AWS. After 14 months of development, it offers a command line, notepad, drawing app, PDF viewer, games, and more, all running in the browser.

Initially a hobby, puter eventually amassed a million users, demonstrating how commercial value often emerges as a by‑product of sustained personal passion.

The article concludes that personal interest is the most scarce productive force; when many programmers pursue their curiosities, the probability of groundbreaking inventions rises.