Pick a project to work on in your free time. A game, an audio synthesizer, a web application, maybe a character or world generator for a tabletop game you enjoy.
Work on it for however small a timeslice you want, while still working on it. Half an hour every weekend, I don't know. Who cares. Just spend that little bit of time solving a problem you care about and see if your enjoyment of programming improves.
I like to write games. From scratch. Well, I use libraries or platforms to do things like load bitmaps and draw to the display, but I don't use Unity, Unreal, or one of those. It's relaxing. I can do things like REFACTOR THE WHOLE DAMN CODEBASE if I want to without stepping on any toes. There's no JIRA, no standups, no coworkers looking at me funny because I use Emacs for all the things, no BAs or PMs telling me "that's out of scope for this sprint--no wait, it must be finished by sprint's end" two days before the sprint ends (actually happened once on the job). There's just me, my goals, and the code.
But that's my jam, yo. You need to find the problems you enjoy solving, then solve them your own way on your own time.
Pick a project to work on in your free time. A game, an audio synthesizer, a web application, maybe a character or world generator for a tabletop game you enjoy.
Work on it for however small a timeslice you want, while still working on it. Half an hour every weekend, I don't know. Who cares. Just spend that little bit of time solving a problem you care about and see if your enjoyment of programming improves.
I like to write games. From scratch. Well, I use libraries or platforms to do things like load bitmaps and draw to the display, but I don't use Unity, Unreal, or one of those. It's relaxing. I can do things like REFACTOR THE WHOLE DAMN CODEBASE if I want to without stepping on any toes. There's no JIRA, no standups, no coworkers looking at me funny because I use Emacs for all the things, no BAs or PMs telling me "that's out of scope for this sprint--no wait, it must be finished by sprint's end" two days before the sprint ends (actually happened once on the job). There's just me, my goals, and the code.
But that's my jam, yo. You need to find the problems you enjoy solving, then solve them your own way on your own time.