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Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

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Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#31

Post by xyzzy4747 »

anthropodie wrote: post #16
kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

I do the same but Go can't help me with frontend, right? What do you do?

Just learn Next.js (Vercel), TypeScript, and MUI and don’t use anything else. Make sure you also understand CSS flex-box and such.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#33

Post by kardianos »

anthropodie wrote: post #16
kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

I do the same but Go can't help me with frontend, right? What do you do?

For the front-end I write SPAs.

I rely on the TS compiler to bundle into a single JS file, so I avoid bundler (etc).

I build a simple framework that meets my needs that I can essentially vendor and keep in my head. I'm would love to use an established framework rather then my own (don't get me wrong, there are serious downsides to rolling my own), but it must be small enough I can read it easily in a single sitting. I will not touch the NPM ecosystem. I sometimes will pull a dependency in by manually copying in the parts I need (preserving licenses, etc).

There are real downsides to doing what I do, but I do it to keep myself sane. I do not touch the npm ecosystem.

I also review every line of code I pull in from any language (Go, TS, etc). An ecosystem that makes this difficult or impossible is just a non-starter.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#34

Post by zikero »

kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

No viable alternative to JS/TS for web (client side) unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#35

Post by steve1977 »

nicoburns wrote: post #17
anthropodie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same but Go can't help me with frontend, right? What do you do?

If you don’t like JS/TS then just don’t do front end? There’s plenty of backend only jobs.

Or remember that there are actually frontends other than web browsers.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#36

Post by majikaja »

I don't live in the US nor work in tech, but I am wondering - have the big tech firms been doing much juniorization lately as part of the recent recruitment spree?

In my industry there certainly was a lot of jobs being dumbed down and hiring standards falling, with the indivisible challenging work being concentrated into the hands of a small number of people.

Personally, I don't find technical implementation any more interesting than creating Excel spreadsheets - it's just a tool for me. Maybe some applications require very sophisticated implementations, but I don't think that's the majority of cases. There's no high-tech feel about IT in 2023 to me.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#37

Post by pigsty »

cnity wrote: post #22
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #12

That doesn’t sound like you’re falling out of love with programming. It sounds like you’re frustrated with the red tape at work. Try working on something fun on the side. Make a game, or a mobile app, or something you’ve always been curious about that doesn’t have anything to do with your job. You might be amazed by how productive you feel when you work on something ambitious that doesn’t involve all of the corporate…

+1 on game development. This is where I always find the most engaging and fun programming puzzles.

Yep.

Key thing is to make small game projects that you aim to finish in well under a year. Once you embark on a big project and feature creep sets in, you’re back to avoiding programming.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#38

Post by kurtbuilds »

You are anxious about things constantly breaking, and you work in Javascript. No surprise.

Try learning Rust.

Your anxiety of things constantly breaking will disappear.

I've been coding for about 20 years. My joy of coding would be gone if not for Rust. Instead, writing code is my primary hobby today, in addition to it being (part of) my job professionally.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#39

Post by jamal-kumar »

kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

Getting proficient with Go has been the best move of my career to date. It's such a productive language, and you don't have the same drowning in dependencies problems whatsoever becuase the stdlib and a few packages around it are just so strong. I like being able to show off a very small go.mod to a boss who's been putting up with NPM hell for the better part of a decade.

I like typescript, I've tried Deno but it's just insane to me how people get caught up in all the hype around the NPM ecosystem only to end up crashing into walls like 'entire system shutting down' with no idea how to fix it. Friend who came before me hit me up asking about a 'linux problem' and it was just webpack crashing his entire computer with semaphore exhaustion. I keep that stuff confined to where it was spawned from, in the browser, anywhere else just doesn't feel sane to me.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#40

Post by onion2k »

Nowadays, I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code.

Join (or start!) a startup and this problem will go away. It'll be replaced with a heap of different problems instead of course, but you will find them more exciting.

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