Code something like you did in your teens. Or pick a very small personal project where you can code each feature in an hour or less. I recently started doing an asteroids clone in C and SDL and it is super fun, and it gives me more energy for my daily job.
Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
181–190 of 337 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#182Same here.
I did start a project for a friend recently and working on a fresh codebase makes it a lot nicer (then I had do import messy data from Excel and it was back to disliking it again).
Around 2011 I started a fresh system for my work and learned Django along the way. That really encouraged me at the time. Everything seemed so well thought through regarding Django and it ramped up my productivity a lot, despite being a new framework and a new language to me.
I think the creative part, designing and coming up with something new helps. Most of jobs hoever are just fixing other peoples crappy code.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.
As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…
I can't empathise with it being a grind - keeping up with the latest developments only makes sense if you need to for your job or the new thing brings something genuinely useful.
However, JavaScript as application code just feels entirely verbose. I guess coming from a very opinionated framework like Rails leaves you sheltered, but I'd rather use a technology designed for the task I'm trying to accomplish than to shoehorn JS into something else.
Personally I find no elegance in JS, and writing it feels like a chore. If I had to do that daily I'd want to quit too. Obviously YMMV, but I get no joy in trying to fit the tool to the job, I'd rather just use another tool.
One of the reasons it's so popular is because JS is like Latin. If you know some words from one Latinate language, you could blag your way around half of Europe, probably order a meal and find directions. If you know some JS syntax, you can scrape by using half the tools out there today, and accomplish a bunch of different things.
If you want to go and live somewhere though, it's better to learn the native tongue.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#184Simple programs! I find I get burned out by commercial code. So many hands have touched it, millions of lines, scant docs, hard to make sense of it, but ... deadlines, get this task done and that. Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again! I am having fun writing a simple nodejs app which is using AWS service. Nothing groundbreaking but its fun to learn and tinker with. I have no expectat…
Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again! I found the opposite was useful. My day job was writing quite trivial code (crud apps, forms, etc) so I started writing far more complex apps in my spare time. Things that were truly challenging. It turns out they're a lot of fun to build.
My day job is fixing what should be trivial code that is ridiculously over complicated for what it is doing. Most apps are just a variation on CRUD, yet people manage to make this ridiculously complex.
There are two kinds of difficult I find. Difficult and rewarding (coming up with an elegant algorithm to solve a problem). Difficult but unrewarding. It doesn't take brainpower to solve these, just knowledge of lots of inconsistencies and a lot of trial end error. Interacting with Saleforce API and a lot of JavaScript / Browser work seems to fall into this category.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#185I went through it. Stopped coding in C#, uninstalled Windows, installed Linux and started learning everything all over again, starting with web dev in Go. The joy of exploring a new environment and language really helped. Still hasn't faded.
I'd also second therapy. Your loss of enjoyment may be a sign of wider issues. At least get it checked out. And you're in the prime age for your "mid-life crisis", which is a real thing that people really go through. Mine was a bastard. Therapy helped.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#186Make a game again. Suggest http://www.roguebasin.com/ as a basis. Love2D (Lua) or GoDot are good starting points. For bonus happies, do it with a kid.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#187It's possible that what you loved was not programming, but being a maker. As a professional programmer you're no longer a maker, the owner of the company is. You're executing his vision, not your own.
You'd probably enjoy building sand castles by the sea, but wouldn't like working as a construction worker building sky scrapers.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#188Programming is in itself interesting and fun to me at times, but IME, don't count on it. Maybe it's fun for brief times while you learn a new language, technology or technique, but at all other times it's the problems you're solving that have to be fun and interesting, and programming is only part of the means to achieve the solutions.
Most fun job I've had constantly required me to learn to acquire new problem domain knowledge. Most boring job I've involved technology that was interesting to learn but rather mundane problems to solve and only really stayed somewhat interesting because of boredom driven architectural choices that introduced new technology to the projects to solve the same old problems.
And it's OK if a job isn't super fun for as long as you find something to do in your own time that's stimulating and interesting.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#189For me it is either math + algorithmic challenges, like projecteuler [1] (which is amazing), or going back to system programming, like trying to write something worthy without libc. Like others have commented, I do need to do this every now and then (~once a year)
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#190I started with something that's completely unrelated to my professional work and to my other side projects: home computer emulator programming.
I moved from C++ to the much simpler C which I started to enjoy more because it's not putting such a "mental barrier" between my brain and the problem to solve (another option would've been to use an entirely different programming language you're currently interested in but can't use "at work").
Basically: have one or several fallback projects which are completely different from your usual work, without any self-imposed deadlines or long term planning to go back to when the other work becomes boring or overwhelming, just having fun is the main point, and part of the fun is going back to the core of what makes programming actually fun: Just whipping out code in a way that "feels right" to you, and seeing things actually happen, free from outside opinions or priorities.
From time to time (usually over the Christmas holidays) I take a deep dive into this project, but otherwise it's just a few hours a week at most, usually with months-long pauses inbetween.
PS: it took me a few months to "detox" my brain from the "professional software development process" that has become the norm in the "industry" ("agile" processes, software development patterns, estimates, tickets and all that crap). Those had been deeply ingrained into my brain in the last decades, but it's important to realize that all these things are, in fact, turning programming into a chore where burnout is ineviatable.