21–30 of 115 posts
You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).
Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial. You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously. 2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly u…
Microcontrollers are fun. The specs of modern MCs are similar to home computers 30 years ago. The community aspect is there. They’re cheap, too.
Soldering is very relaxing as well.
I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.
I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.
He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.
To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)
My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).
Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.
"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"
I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.