Developer's block

I kinda started programming on IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, then Android Studio) and the templates they is kinda a nice way to get quickly started on some projects and not have to worry about configurations. These days, I prefer CLI tooling, so I copy things over from projects on GitHub.

True, but as someone with a pain condition... Most throwaway suggestions won't help out. People always try to help, but rarely can. That's fine. Take the kindness, discard the advice.

But because I've struggled with this thing for decades, I probably do have enough tools to find my own way. And if I've run out, it means I'm about to burnout and need to find a way to restore ASAP.

There’s no golden rule. For me, both work and learning out of curiosity is stress inducing activity. Nail biting, valsalva breathing, skin rashes etc.

I just grind through it and repeat the days.

I would do only aimless activities if I relied on the feels.

This kind of negative emotional investment seems to be the only thing that improves my abilities. If I’m learning through Anki or playing tunes on the piano, habit can stop after 6 months of regular daily practice.

But if I’m on the brink of stress rage frustration, somehow it persists .

> A new project and it’s going to be your best ever

A good defense against this is borrowing stuff from your prior projects, alongside eventually creating templates for the most common stuff.

For example, in new side projects I start, I can borrow the web server (ingress) configuration from the prior ones, same for CI pipelines and a large part of the previous Dockerfiles, sometimes even entire services with all of the annoying setup and configuration stuff already done.

Plus, this way, you have a more or less working baseline and further iteration is entirely up to you - and if you do want to improve things a bunch, then the next time your template will be even better and you'll be able to backport whatever you think everything should have to your other projects as well.

Going with the simplest solutions along the way helps: Bash scripts for triggering builds, CI configuration just calling those, using Docker or similar containers for the environments and builds, your ingress just being Nginx/Caddy/Apache2/..., using PostgreSQL or SQLite and specialized stuff like Redis/Valkey, RabbitMQ, MinIO and so on instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes it's also useful to write utility scripts and even small tools to help with the projects, I bet developers that have been around for decades and are way better than I am have a lot of that stuff, alongside a healthy helping of dotfiles for existing tools to get in the zone while doing the dev work. Although it can also be helpful to go the YAGNI route and customize things as little as possible, like a stock IDE install, not even bothering with the color themes or keybinds or a plethora of plugins - just install and go.

I agree. I've been experimenting with writing DoDs for anything longer than an hour's work (things that often end up taking a month.) It helps. I think there's also something to setting structured goals, and sequencing mid-term sub-projects. If you can define scope and definition of done for the current sub-project then you can be clear on what is important now, and what you can defer for a later phase.

Relatedly, I've been hearing a bit about goal hierarchies lately. This seems like a more flexible approach than reducing everything to a TODO list and/or backlog. (Here's a random description of goal hierarchies that seems like a good introduction: https://www.spcperformancelab.com.au/personal-training-advic...)