Ramblings of a Tampa engineer
Photo by James Michael Vallado / Unsplash

A few months ago Alyson and I took up a new temporary hobby and knocked out 5 different road run 5k's (Part 1 & Part 2) in a few weeks time. As summer struck the amount of races declined, but we found some cool ones to register in October a few months away. I started thinking that most of my hobbies come and go and don't really often share free time with another hobby. I tend to go all in on a hobby until exhaustion and swap to another and rinse and repeat.

What I mean is a couple months ago any free hobby moment was working on the Cicada 3301 puzzles which led to a Part 3 and Part 4 blog posts and a build out of a public GitHub repository. I had an urge to work on Cicada research again, but coworkers pulled my focus to a new active treasure hunt that is unsolved (as of this post).

There's Treasure Inside book

This new treasure hunt required purchasing a book which reminded me of A Treasure's Trove, which was the same idea - real treasures hidden in real life with clues in the book. However I ordered this book on April 23 and haven't even read a single page yet which just shows how many other hobbies are competing for this.

If we look purely at nerdy "coding" hobbies I'm presently balancing:

  • Apktool - Java reverse engineering tools.
  • Cicada 3301 - A repository collecting and documenting the puzzle.
  • Leaf - Halo Infinite stat sites that just passed 100 million games logged.
  • Ingress - Random tools for my team.
  • OpenAI/PHP - Library for using OpenAI in PHP.
  • pi-stats - A long-term storage for logging all my DNS traffic project.

Basically a set of random hobby programming projects that my focus takes turns moving between and those are the purely technical coding ones. Leaf for examples gets focus when a Halo update comes out and Apktool tends to follow the AOSP release cycle in terms of when I focus it the most.

A cool pipe I saw at a park.

If we look in the outdoor world those hobbies would expand even further to:

  • Kayaking to the little islands around Florida.
  • Running to stay in shape and compete in races.
  • Exploring trails or parks to see nature.
  • Playing Ingress anywhere and everywhere.
  • Rollerblading at a place that feels like its stuck in the 90s.

Basically exploring Florida's natural attractions is always a fun hobby unless its blistering hot with no shade. Like building my fold-able kayak to kayak around some mangroves in a shady area is a tough hobby to beat.

The built kayak before kayaking.

Yet I can ignore all of that and head into mega nerd mode with even more hobbies at home with activities like:

  • Busting out the old GameCube to play Zelda Windwaker.
  • Playing Halo 2 on the original Xbox with Insignia.
  • Playing anything on the gaming computer like Overwatch, Gears of War or Halo.
  • Working on my Homelab or weather station or WiFi defense.

I can share hobby time from a digital world to a physical world with hobbies in both and that is exciting, but honestly not as exciting as date night.

You’ve successfully subscribed to Connor Tumbleson
Welcome back! You’ve successfully signed in.
Great! You’ve successfully signed up.
Success! Your email is updated.
Your link has expired
Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.