
Ask HN: How to recover interest in programming? - webesmoking
I&#x27;ve been working at my current place for almost two years. I&#x27;m not the best engineer, but I get my stuff done on time and mostly with no issues, so I can definitely program. While I&#x27;m not the most &quot;passionate&quot; person for my job, I don&#x27;t hate coming into work.<p>For the past few months, I&#x27;ve noticed that my interest in programming outside of work has waned. There are things I&#x27;m interested in (iOS&#x2F;macOS development, Elixir, Clojure, some frontend stuff) but I lack motivation or impetus to actually do them long enough to learn or make anything.<p>One problem I have is that I have no itch to scratch. When learning something new, I can&#x27;t apply it because I have no problems I need solving with computers... I&#x27;ve tried to come up with some but it always feels like I&#x27;m forcing technology intro a problem that doesn&#x27;t need it or forcing myself to do OSS when I don&#x27;t even use the library I&#x27;m helping out with.<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one that feels this way. Have you gotten over it and how?
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the2bears
I had a similar experience.

After ~18 years of Java I was feeling very burnt out. Initially it was the
concurrency model and how it was being widely used. This itself drove me to
find alternatives.

I started off knowing that Go, Scala, and Clojure (among others) offered
cleaner abstractions on this. I figured I'd learn them a little and see where
that took me - Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks was the book I first
looked at.

It honestly didn't take long, but something with Clojure just clicked with me.
Concurrency aside, the REPL experience and immutable data grabbed me and said
"Keep learning this language!"

So I took an old game that I'd done in Java (with OpenGL bindings) and started
rewriting it in Clojure. Loved the experience and kept working on any problems
I could find to try out the functional approaches I was learning.

The punch-line is I fell in love with programming again. I was able to find my
passion, to realize again why I went into this field. Slowly turned the career
direction and now work full time with Clojure.

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slipwalker
i am also struggling with the same feelings for years. Earlier this month i
stumbled across the "discipline beats motivation" trend (
[https://iheartintelligence.com/2016/11/17/discipline-
beats-m...](https://iheartintelligence.com/2016/11/17/discipline-beats-
motivation/) ). So i elected a problem i (kind of) want to solve, blocked my
calendar 2 hours every night ( when i usually would be surfing netflix ) and
been coding. Right now, my progress is still too slow and too "painful", but i
just hope to keep going and finish this... let's see... feels like the first
month on gym.

------
cimmanom
I very recently rediscovered mine.

I was looking for a tool, and it didn't exist. But I did find an abandoned
open source repo that could do the core 70% of the job - including the tiny
core part that I didn't have the skills to even begin to implement.

So I began working on getting it to run at all and then to build the
application I wanted around that core.

I would not have found so much joy in this project if it weren't for the
following factors:

It was solving a problem that I really had. Maybe not anything important or
urgent, but something that had been annoying me for ages.

It was within my grasp. I was able to make visible headway within minutes and
more progress within hours. I didn't have to spend weeks buried in textbooks
before even getting started.

It was challenging. It required learning technologies that are adjacent to the
ones I work with every day but that I'd never touched. With every feature I
wrote and issue I debugged I was learning something, and something potentially
useful outside this project.

I was able to build momentum. A friend reminded me early on to skip the "make
it right" and focus on just building the proof of concept. It had been years
since I'd done that. It resulted in much faster progress and a much more
rewarding experience. This was reinforced a few days in when I started to get
bored with the project after an afternoon away from it - but as soon as I
picked it up again and spent 20 minutes implementing another bug fix, I was
utterly engrossed again.

And now that I'm feeling good about the project it's no longer arduous or
intimidating to go back and add test coverage and proper configuration and to
refactor things.

Finally, I made it unintimidating. As I built the project out it started to
grow a backlog of notes about things to add or fix or improve. At about 20
items, though I didn't notice it, that list began to unconsciously weigh me
down; by 50 it was paralyzing. I solved that by breaking out a separate
document with just the next 3 small changes I want to make. That document
isn't allowed to grow longer than 5 SMALL items.

Basically, the trick turned out to be hacking my brain to reassociate
programming with a steady stream of tiny dopamine hits instead of a continuous
stream of frustrations and "it's not good enough" judgements from both myself
and external project stakeholders.

