I have a box full of film gear and development equipment because, one day, I want to hang a picture of my kids on the wall that I _made_. My photo, on film I developed, printed manually by my hand, hung in a frame I built. I'll get to it some day!
The idea of building a camera like this tickles me the same way. It's fun!
Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.
I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.
Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.
Still working with them 6 years later.
I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!
The idea of building a camera like this tickles me the same way. It's fun!