I read this when it was posted here recently and it re-sparked me enough to get back up
The Best of edw519 - A Hacker News Top Contributor http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html
Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#22I never stopped loving to code...but for many years i only kept it as very mild dabbling on the side...Back in the early 2000s, i was a lowly web developer (mostly simple html, javascript, classic ASP/vbscript, sql server stuff) for a large multinational enterprise...in fact for most of my career i've only worked for medium or large multi-nationals (except for 1 year in a non-profit). What brought me back was 2 things:
1. learning python...which made me so productive without needing to learn some verbose language like java, etc.
2. open source software that let me build stuff without needing to pay large license fees.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#23Work on something you're not getting paid for and that nobody's making you do.
I find it 1000x harder to get excited about code I need to write vs. code for the current bee in my bonnet.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#24I was thinking the same scrolling HN, then saw your post. After 15 years I'm no longer interested. I don't care about the web, css, javascript, react, testing....it's just an increasingly tedious and difficult headache to me. I have a creative urge, and a problem solving urge, but i feel maybe it can be better expressed through another medium. I just wish I had some way to unchain myself from this 9-6 5 days a week s…
I can sympathize with that npm point. I think there's a real distinction between coding-as-problem-solving and coding-as-plumbing, and I feel like a lot of the wear and tear of the motivation to code comes from the latter. This reminds me of the essay the MIT guys published on why they stopped using the classic SICP curriculum and instead moved to Python, the gist of it being that the kind of development they used to…
This is good advice. Thanks for sharing.
To OP: What has re-motivated me to code is not the coding work itself; but the application of my skills to solve problems that I care about.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#25I haven't lost my love for coding. Coding lost its love for me.
Oh, coding. We used to be so similar. We'd gaze into each other's eyes and get lost for hours, days at a time, teasing the vast boundaries cast by simple questions. But coding changed. You changed, coding, you changed and you left me behind.
All you care about now, coding, is looking in the mirror. Measuring yourself. Analytics. Velocities, sprint points, backlogs; you say you want me, coding, but you really just want me to be there and watch while you go do what we used to do, as the younger developers frolic with the old questions anew. I think, coding, that you're just using me because I accidentally showed you I could do the other things.
You say that we're still coding, coding, but this relationship died a while ago and I'm still around because I'm in love with a ghost.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#26Not at all a coder, but a painter. Ever now and then I loose the allure of my profusion. What usually brings it back is a change of medium (e.g. from oil painting to digital painting, or from large paintings to small ones). I guess that translates to a change in coding language in your game.
Not a change in language, but in problem space (which tends to lead to a change in language).
If you're a .NET enterprise CRUD guy, try web. If you're web, try C++ application work. Try kernel stuff, try embedded. Branch out.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#271. Learn to build things 2. Learn to hack them 3. Build tools to hack things (or learn existing ones, e.g. https://github.com/GhostPack and https://github.com/cobbr/Covenant for you .NET folks) Going from business apps to tools offers a nice change of pace.
4. Give yourself permission to write quick, sloppy, slapdash, throwaway code. Note that you won't necessarily DO so but the permission itself lets you stop worrying about engineering the entire product ecosystem and just enjoy bashing out something fun that does something.
You can always fix it later... or not!
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#28Yes and no. I've learned to accept the tedium of doing software development at work. But I've grown impatient with the act of coding itself - it just takes too fucking long to do anything. Too much accidental complexity one has to wade through, to express even simplest ideas. My coding cannot keep up with my thoughts, and I find it tiring.
I've ranted on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28568053.
I have some ideas for improvements, but alas, between being a parent and working as a software dev, I hardly have the energy to explore them.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#29Starting again after a break is a big help. Likewise trying to do something else for a while and realizing that the grass is always greener helps to get things in perspective.
I also think if you love coding then moving up the ladder is neither necessary or helpful because once you get into having to be responsible for other folk than yourself, fun tends to drop off. Coding is potentially a creative activity if you allow it to be.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#30This could be a symptom of burnout (or depression) which are slightly wider topics and so have more advice available if that seems to fit. For regaining joy in programming specifically, I'd say the same as I say to people trying to learn in the first place. Try to find a project that has some real world impact that you actually care about (even if it's trivial or frivolous to others) and use that as a focus to get yo…
It's notable how often, too, folk turn to craft analogies when talking about code.
So many people in tech (including me) try to turn to craft/art as a way of 'escaping' the grind. It's often not the coding that gets people down but all the 'organisational' activity (or management or however you want to phrase that) that goes alongside.