Have you ever lost the love for coding? I sure did after a grind as CTO of a startup and then director at a financial services company. Needing everything yesterday and dealing with the corporate politics - I found my work was no longer any fun. I took a sabbatical and leveled up on Python/Django and started having fun again. I even made and sold a micro-startup that was Django based. What I loved was it allowed me to be productive as an individual - I didn't need a team of 10 to produce something. Have you ever lost your love for coding and then gotten it back? If so how?
Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
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Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#2I've never lost it but I for sure have my days where I wish I never became a SWE and became a baker or something instead. I don't know what sort of projects your coming from but I know big enterprise projects can really become a drag, couple that with politics and it's not a good mix.
For me I always did some coding at home on my own projects. For me one of the most stressful things in coding professionally is dealing with shit outside of your control. Being able to work on a project that is entirely conceived and written by you lets you have that control back, even if it's on a small toy project.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#3Hobby projects. Make something that you care about and want to have.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#4I was planning to go get my MBA, then I transferred teams and suddenly I like programming again. To be fair I don't think it was so much the coding that I didn't like, as everything that came with it (at least on my previous team) which in turn made me not want to code anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#5This 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 you through the boring bits.
Similar to woodworking or other crafts, a crappy product that you (or someone else) can actually use for something is a lot more satisfying than a perfectly made thing with no use to anyone.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#61. 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.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#7My love of coding is conditional. I still hate work related coding. I love working on my individual projects. I just dont have much drive to do the personal projects after working all day (and child care responsibilities).
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#8I attended Strange Loop.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#9Stop coding and let the reservoir of desire build back up again.
Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?
#10> What I loved was it allowed me to be productive as an individual - I didn't need a team of 10 to produce something.
For me it was the opposite. Being able to give people an environment in which they can express their creativity and thrive has been wildly satisfying. I love building the boring parts of a codebase (setting up scaffolding, CI/CD, etc) because I love seeing people be able to build off of it.