101–110 of 219 posts
You will need a week or two learning curve if you are really good at picking up things. After that, the noise will fade away. You will be able to fully focus on building stuff and have fun.
If you are trying to interact with native platform in very advanced way, the non-fun parts will be back for a bit. It is still better than others.
What I’ve been enjoying A TON lately is embedded development for hobby. Not Arduino, but bare metal, flipping registers and configuring devices in a STM32, writing linker scripts and scripting gdb.
It feels awesome to understand a system completely (sort of). I’m writing C but I also wrote the assembly that bootstraps my C environment and calls main()
That combined with some reverse engineering to figure out the MIDI protocol and a buzzer and LED and I’ve made a little instrument that I can play with my keyboard!
Next I’m planning to understand how USB works and maybe make the little instrument controllable over USB? Who knows!
I’ve realized that what I enjoy about programming is the puzzle, the thing that I don’t know, and then learning it, and then doing something fun with it.
Wish you the best and tons of fun in your journey!
- Forget about the JavaScript ecosystem, don't even touch it, it's a monster
- Use htmx on the front-end (https://htmx.org/)
- Use plain-old CSS with minimum dependencies (sanitize.css)
- Use lightweight CSS framework if you need one (bulma or purecss)
- Use Go on the backend (all other modern languages are bloated)
- Use AWS Lambda
- Use DynamoDB if you don't need data processing
- Use Postgres if you hate or don't want to learn DynamoDB
- Compile SQL to type-safe code (https://sqlc.dev/)
Instead I realized quickly that what drove me to quit had been the fact that the joy of coding had left me. And so for the last two months I have been working towards regaining it.
And at this point I realize I have gained it back.
The only projects I have been working on are small libraries and apps whose ideas had written down over the years but never touched.
The longest project has been 3 weeks. Others, like the library I worked on today, have only taken a couple of days. Also done some open source contributions here and there.
I would now recommend it to anyone, given if their financial situation allows for it, to step off the hamster wheel on occasion and work on the things that really motivate them.
When I re-enter the job market, it will be with renewed vigor and plenty of new know-how.
You can... just not as a professional. Work kills the joy. As only a hobby it could be fun again.
If you want to have fun, dig into some subfield of computer science, like databases, ray tracing, etc. Something that has been studied rigorously. There, knowledge actually compounds and builds on itself, rather than being thrown out every two years for no gain. Build something small and see if the subject gels with you. If it does, go deeper. If it doesn't, try another one and see if it works. Once you find somethin…
> There, knowledge actually compounds and builds on itself, rather than being thrown out every two years for no gain. That's most of fields. Webshit development is very much exception here, although one with a lot of market share.
I should probably work up the motivation to do that again come to think of it.
Pick up an Arduino and there’s no one right answer. It’s still very hobby oriented, so a lot of people do fun an wacky things. The learning curve is fairly short. What I call the ‘book count,’ or how many books you need to read to be productive, is pretty low. On the other end of embedded, it gets very formal, very quick, but that’s for professional embedded developers.
Or, pick a ‘dead’ language. Go to some vendor like thrift books, or hunt used book stores, for books on that language. You might find some for $5. There’s no pressure, and you have full agency to make the greatest or the worst decisions you want. And a lot of the communities around these ‘dead’ languages are a lot of fun.
If you want to have fun, dig into some subfield of computer science, like databases, ray tracing, etc. Something that has been studied rigorously. There, knowledge actually compounds and builds on itself, rather than being thrown out every two years for no gain. Build something small and see if the subject gels with you. If it does, go deeper. If it doesn't, try another one and see if it works. Once you find somethin…
If, on the other hand, you want to actually build something that you hope other people will try, adopt, give feedback, and (heaven forbid) actually pay you something for your trouble...then that is hard. You have to worry about things like what operating system or browser it runs on. If you want the project to also be rewarding to many other people, then all the business processes come into play (finding market fit, raising capital, evangelizing it, etc.) which can often be not fun to a technical person.
I know from experience with my own project. Shameless plug: https://didgets.com/