Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)

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This comment might be one of the meanest comment I have ever seen.

Hm, I'm sorry you feel that way. It's not meant to be mean. On the contrary; Instead of encouraging someone who I feel is going down a wrong path, to me it's kinder to express my view that they aren't. I have personally wasted years of my life on technical projects, and would have been better off if someone had told me that it was a bad idea.

I'm of the opinion that these passion projects are incredibly important.

Your passions projects were problably also far more important to your growth than you give them credit for.

Scratching an itch is how we, as programmers/engineers/whatever, grow. It is also how we stumble into solving real problems and make our mark on the world.

Who knows, this could become the next big player in the browsersphere, or maybe it'll pivot into something else, or perhaps it will spark someones imagination. At the very least it has (probably) already been a source of creative bliss and pride for the ones involved, which in my opinion makes it worthwhile.

I agree

I understand what you are saying and don't fully disagree. You can allocate time & energy into immediate real world solutions while reaping the personal growth. There is certainly a balance.

The counter-point is that in the case of a web browser you are studying deeply one of the most impactful technologies to exist, and you will learn 80% of the most important lessons with a minimal working build, maybe 0.1% of the real thing. You may learn and execute much faster too because there is a clear blueprint, and you are likely riding a wave of passion that will carry your mind to places you won't have expected.

The perspective gained puts you in a much better place to identify & execute successfully more impactful work. The work may be the seed of something more important, but unseen or unknown yet.

Except that it’s going to be used as odoo’s pdf generator so it’ll actually get used by at least thousands of people

I know you intended to be helpful and didn't mean to be unkind.

But, this site is called Hacker News, and it's always been one of the site's most important roles, to feature and celebrate novel and interesting projects that people hack on, for whatever reason they choose.

There are all kinds of things that can be learned by starting with a blank slate and re-implementing something as ubiquitous and foundational as a web browser.

Over the years, many users have enjoyed undertaking a course called "Nand to Tetris" [1]. I hope to find time to do it one day. I don't expect it will make me substantially more employable, but I think I'll enjoy learning about the fundamentals, and I'm sure it will be beneficial in my work somehow.

Please let's remember that the playful exploration that happens through a project like this can lead to all kinds of benefits that might be non-obvious, and that it’s fine to appreciate the effort for its own sake.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...