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Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

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71–80 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#71
As long as it's not web-based, I still have an interest. I completely lost all desire to touch any "web code"

But if we're talking locally running python or controlling hardware via microcontrollers, or things like that- I'm not well-versed in any of it, but it still grabs my interest, and the little I have done, even just small learning projects, has been fulfilling.

If it requires anything web-based, then it drains me of all happiness.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#72

I 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…

Is this a play on something else? Well written and the sentiment is unfortunately true in a lot of cases.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#73

After 10 years at a FAANG (and 25 years of programming generally) I haven't lost my love of coding because I hardly get to do any at all. But I have definitely lost my tolerance for process, paper shuffling, politics etc. I'd love a job again where there was a clear path forward and a bunch of code to write. But in a large org the interesting coding work is eaten up in a feeding frenzy and people like me who don't wa…

Sadly I’m watching one of the companies I consult with go this way prioritizing process over productivity, while at the same time basing requirements on the deals they’ve signed lately rather than a clear plan. I’ve seen it before and it is painful to watch.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#76
I never lost an interest in it. It is just the corporate politics comes with the job, but that's not related to programming itself. Though, the only time work-programming gets interesting is if there is some problem to be solved that requires more than routine development.

Doing something completely different is really nice, to toy around with, at least if you have enough spare time to do something.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#77

Switched to a functional language (Elixir) from an OO one (Ruby). Now it's only JS that annoys me, since CSS is declarative and therefore less of a headache.

this x1000. My main frustration with imperative programming has become the devops plumbing and defensive nature in code that was needed to get something done. Switching to Elixir - learning what OTP brings to the table, e.g. observers, genservers - distillery compiled binaries per OS, negating the need for a lot of the devops complexity, e.g. docker, node, - the switch to esbuild and liveview for less JS cruft - FP t…

I've been soft-evangelizing it for a while now (difficult because I'm also kind of anti-religion/dogma) but what we need more of is data supporting our lived experiences/intuitions... I haven't found much out there (there is some, but it's definitively insufficient)

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#78
post #72

I 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…

Is this a play on something else? Well written and the sentiment is unfortunately true in a lot of cases.

thanks! i was just rambling and having fun. appreciate the kind words

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What medium are you expressing your creative and problem-solving urges through now?

I guess I meant it in a kind of half poetic sense. I would like to write, or maybe do some kind of digital or video art. I got into web dev around 98-99 and i've been doing it ever since. I think what appealed to me about it about the time was the immediacy of it, being able to write these little js widgets and see them in action instantly. Trying to build these intricate table layouts to replicate the offline versio…

I asked because I'm partly in the same situation. I don't write code for work, but have (and had) too many side projects running. The fun is always at the start: thinking of something, sometimes discussing with potential users and being able to see things realized pretty quickly. But then the complexity kicks in indeed, and the fun turns into a drag.

(I've never been able to monetize anything for more than a few bucks a month, simply because I like to spend more time on creating something new than growing what I have)

Your initial comment made me realize I'm perhaps more interested in creating things that do not solve a problem (like my side projects do), but that express an idea instead.

I'll try and consider my knowledge of coding (Python and web front end) as an extra tool for expressing ideas, next to writing and talking.

Thanks for inciting this train of thought within me :)

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#80

After 40 years (just retired) as a programmer, I still write code every day (but now what I want, mostly art related), I never got tired of writing code or learning new things, and the joy of shipping things that worked. What I did get tired of was high stress work, long hours, idiotic executive decisions and politics, businesses going out of business, interviewing (even when successful) and dealing with terrible wor…

Would you mind sharing some of the art-related projects you have been working on?

Twitter handle is @digconart
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