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by marcusr
3519 days ago
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I'm guessing I'm a similar age to the author from the reference to parents shouting at the phone bill from my 1200/75 modem running all night. And just recently I've felt exactly the same way. My job involves both running systems and writing software, and the joy has disappeared from both. I used to work all day, then come home and hack all evening, but now I don't know if I'm burnt out, but I can find no interest in making computers do cool things any more. There's been one small bright spot - I tried learning Haskell and loved the way functional programming stretched my brain but there's an awful lot to learn to do anything useful. But Elm, wow, do I love Elm. I feel the excitement I felt when I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time ten years ago. It's finding something interesting and useful to build with Elm that I'm struggling with now. I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise. |
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I noticed this when I got my first job, some ten years ago. Back then, I was hacking on Maemo like crazy. I moderated newsgroups, I contributed code to anything I could, in any language that would let me.
I loved my new job. I worked anywhere between 40 and 140 hours, depending on how much work or stress there was. Very quickly, this started eating away at my ability to contribute and participate in the communities I loved and adored.
After some time, I even struggled with becoming a troll against those very communities.
Fast forward some time, and I still haven't found a way to produce software as a hobby. Sometimes I'll get a burst of energy, and manage to architect, document and write a few thousand lines of code over the course of a few weeks, but it's definitely not sustainable.