Make time for play time! Check out this book I'm currently going through to play with Crystal. The book itself is language agnostic. https://pragprog.com/book/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challenge It's really sparking joy in me.
Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
251–260 of 337 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#252I became a teacher, so now I get to share the joy of programming with kids. I also manage the technology at my school, so I do some programming to enable that, which is enjoyable because I am pretty independent. I work at a great school with good kids, so my gig is not a common one, but it works for me.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#253I started creating courses in Scratch to teach my daughter programming.
I was making clones of arcade games from my days as a kid in the 1980's. This really awoke a joy inside of me to do this.
Scratch is such a cool concept for kids.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#254Have you considered it might not be a love of programming you're lost, but other mental health issue?
I mean- burnout, depression, PTSD, ...?
Are there things you're highly passionate about and would want to do instead of software engineering or it's all grey for everything?
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#255I'm only at around 13 years of professional programming, but I went through a period of 4-5 years where I stopped enjoying it (actually, I hated it). What resolved it for me was pretty simple in the end: I joined a company where I really believe in the mission, and I'm surrounded by like-minded people. This has given me a great amount of motivation and reminded me that programming is a superpower. I was simply lost o…
> Another thing that helped me was researching other careers. I found a couple of things I think I would get a great deal of satisfaction from. I felt very trapped in a career I hated, and looking at another 30+ years of this was like a dark cloud over me. I sometimes wish I had gone to school, but for something other than CS. I got into software development with no career at all, there arent a ton of other interesti…
I am in the same position. I also wish I'd gone to university, taken my education seriously, and done something other than CS (all easy to say in retrospect). There's still time :)
There are plenty of careers out there that are open to smart but unqualified people though. Once I looked around I realised my options aren't so bad (and some of the options I found may tempt me yet).
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#256Learn functional programming or different programming paradigms. For example learning Elm brought me a lot of joy and wanted to implement stuff like tetris, snake, other little apps and toys.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#25720 years of anything is enough to evaluate other options. That's perfectly normal and expected. Congratulations on reaching this milestone! While you no longer find joy in programming, aren't the broader goals of why you're programming clear? Working without a sense of mission or purpose is a sure way to hate what one is doing. Are you getting that at your job?
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#258Diving into functional programming has rekindled my passion. Elm in particular.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#259I used to love front end development until react came along
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#260Great write-up on that subject is in the first chapter of "Mythical Man-Month". Here is small excerpt. Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight…
And the rest of the book deals with why it is more often than not painful. In summary, it's complexity. Brooks argues that software, being a pure thought-stuff, is also the most complex thing we attempt to build. And it's even worse now than in his time with any concern for quality taking a back seat in the face of competitive pressures. So it's not really surprising that slapping together ever more complex systems o…
After taking a break from software side-projects to work on more physical things (woodworking, metal-working, welding). I have to agree that software is one of the most complex things we work on. Even something quite complicated that's evolved over decades, like a car, is largely comprehensible to a single person without an enormous amount of effort (i.e. many people understand how every single subsystem of a car works), while understanding everything in say linux or postgres takes a much higher level of effort (it can be done too, but there is a lot more complexity to keep track of).