Work with constraints. Try embedded bare metal programming, or programming for a fantasy console like PICO8.
Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
211–220 of 337 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#212My two cents: change career and move to another place. I moved every four years, from countries to countries, continent to continent, never worked more than 3-4 years in one job. Career change can be from your current employer to another one or from your current favorite language to something different. It is a radical mindset change, being a slow moving individual. but the wealth of learning from different places an…
This may work if you are single.With family and kids its hardship. I did this with my family ,now after 3 years i wanna move out but the kids find it difficult and my wife has her difference after kids.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#21320 years is a long time in anything. My first piece of advice is that nobody here knows who you are, nobody here knew you as a teenager, and nobody is going to understand what "love programming" and "don't enjoy it" actually means for you. The point is: anybody who claims that they got de-burned-out with this one trick isn't necessarily dishonest or naive, and if something in the comments here resonates, then by all…
I'm also not trying to sound dismissive or condescending, but it really seems weird to me that if somebody says they are have been doing something for 20 years and now they are bored of it, then they should consider seeing a therapist?
I mean, there are plenty of things I used to like that I don't anymore, should I go see a therapist every time my interests change?
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#214Earlier 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'm one of those "weirdos" who loves writing JS, and yet I agree with everything you just said being horrible. But I enjoy writing plain JS, that doesn't mean react, angular... i've run out of examples because I honestly don't care about those things.
However, I'm in a position where I have enough autonomy to avoid all that crap and just use the bits I like. When you get minimal and ignore all of the noise about the latest hotness JS libraries, the plain language (not including the lanky browser APIs) is not unpleasant especially over the last few years where some modern syntactic features were added - You can go even further and be selective of the language itself and it can get even more pleasantly minimal, my recent delight has been excluding classes and prototypes as much as possible.
When you take this approach the whole "churn" issue disappears (JS is backwards compatible, you will never have the issues you have with Rust or Elm forcing you to re-write).
I suppose this is the argument many make for C++ which is that, yes it can be a complex nightmare, or (if you are able) you can restrict yourself to a desirable subset and have a happy time. In JS's case, most of the complexity is from "keeping up" with the community and libraries, not the core language itself.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#215You could rediscover programming with kids. Likely there is a local codo dojo or the like. When you have to dig down the lower layers of your programming skills to explain the most basic things in a fun way, you might remember why it was fun to you as well once.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#216I have ups and downs, I really enjoy programming when I can get my teeth into something I'm really passionate about, but there are other parts of the year where I fall into a "programmers block" and can't bring myself to do anything.
My fondest programming memories are those aforementioned passion projects, but they're often fleeting. What tends to happen is I go all in on something, write a blog post about it then it kind of drifts away and ultimately I drift too.
It's hard, I'm not sure how to solve it other than saying these feelings come and go - you'll find something/inspiration in the most unexpected places.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#217Jerry Weinberg has a chapter on burnout in one of his books [0]. He refers to the idea of 'the oxygen mask', making sure you've taken care of yourself so you have resources from which to give. He talks about how having a long list of 'shoulds' can wear you down, and how competence can lead to collecting more responsibilities than you can manage.
He then places burnout at the foreign element stage of the Satir Change Model (see, e.g. [1]): Old status quo - foreign element - chaos - transforming idea - practice - New status quo... with the intent of using your present discomfort to evaluate changes you might want or need to make. If the idea seems helpful, have a look.
[0] 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Toolkit', Gerald Weinberg
[1] http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change...
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#218I'm in a bit of a reverse situation. I left programming some 12 yrs and want to get back into it. But I find it so hard with all the commandline installs, config files etc. The barrier to just getting to "hello world" seems so high now. Pasting my recent ask HN here in case I have better luck: What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days? -A simple CRUD web app -No new sytax to learn (just good o…
I was in the exact same position -- the ecosystem looks intimidating these days, but fortunately PHP is pretty much still PHP. I started back in by getting a handle on Composer[0], which is the only new necessity, and if you have any *nix experience is just a basic package manager (so you don't have to worry about checking for updates and managing individual dependency files like the old days).
Composer also provides the benefit of a lot of neat packages that can help accomplish a lot of the heavy lifting, depending on your needs. For my purposes, the Slim Framework[1] was perfect. Beyond that, PHP still has PDO, so I wrote a simple class to manage my common CRUD activities. I haven't bought into the npm-gulp-JS-babel hamster wheel nonsense for the front-end. I still download the odd JS library and FTP upload my files.
Tying it back to the OP, I really rediscovered the joy of programming by ignoring all the over-engineered nonsense that's taken over (particularly in web dev). I stopped feeling like I'm behind if I don't spend a day learning about a process that might save me 20 minutes but will be deprecated in a month and obsolete in a year. I went back to just writing the code that does what I need it to do.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#219I'm still a student, so I didn't went throug the process of not enjoing programming and then rediscover that joy again. But have you tried working on a side project? I think that working on something you choose to do and without the anxiety of deadlines is one of the best ways to enjoy what you're doing. If you also wish to be helpful, there's lots of open source projects that would benefit from the contribution of an experienced programmer, maybe even something that you're already using daily so that by working on it your contribute is both helpful to yourself and others.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#220Use it as a tool to solve problems. So, find some interesting problems to solve.