I've been there before. After getting burnt out on my startup, I spent about half a year traveling and trying out other hobbies not doing any coding at all.
When I got back to it I felt a little bit lost as to what to do, but doing these things helped me get back into the habit:
- Find a good project-oriented book and just follow along. In my case this was "Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles", but according to your interests and skill-levels there's plenty of good project-oriented books out there. I think this is good to do in parallel with your own side projects, because it gives you structure that the writers gave some pedagogical thought towards, and will thus help you gain confidence by solving problems and building something substantial over several weeks or months. This confidence will then put you in a better headspace for your self-directed work.
Don't engage in the online tutorials, where the author maybe wrote in a couple hours over a weekend. Instead, find well-respected books and courses that the authors poured serious effort into and that people consistently cite as having been influential to them.
- Read and engage with activities besides programming. I think one problem beginning programmers have is that they get so obsessed with just consuming programming related content. While the concentrated education you'll get out of this is great, from my experience reading about programming and tech doesn't lead to interesting ideas about things to make. What I think does lead to interesting ideas is cultivating curiosity about the world, and feeding it through reading and exploring.
- Study good software. In most creative disciplines there's a huge emphasis on studying the works of the masters of the art. This is so students can 1) understand the discipline's history and 2) develop good taste. The creation of software, whether you view it from a coding angle or from a UI angle, is mostly a design discipline. So taste matters a lot. I recommend studying the history of computing and finding good old artifacts to study(history is good because the excitement the pioneers felt might rub off on you, and help you see the field from a fresh perspective). Any software that you personally enjoy using is worth studying like this, but I think paying attention to the classics helps too.
- Learn how to design. This might seem like a distraction, but improving your design skills even just a bit can really help with making your ideas more engaging. The design community also has a lot of practices and advice on how to come up with good ideas that are worth seeking out.
- Find creators whose work you enjoy, follow them, and study their work. The most creative and prolific people I know all have one or more creators who were massive inspirations for them, and that they obsessed over and often spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to emulate. Too much focus on the copying part can be a hindrance in the short term, but being sensitive to these chains of inspiration, and seeking out who inspired the people who inspired you, can lead you down interesting paths. Find networks of creatives locally, on Twitter, slack groups, wherever, and engage with them, and contextualize your work in their framework(whether it's startups, art, or anything).
- Read up on creativity! IMO while self-help and pop-psychology books/ can be counterproductive if you spend too much time in them, in small doses they can be useful for analyzing your habits and practices. I recommend reading visakanv's threads about these topics: https://www.notion.so/a-list-of-visakanv-s-threads-1a6ed25cf...