[sp527]

This is going to sound odd but I'd recommend journaling. You need to spend some time free writing to access your subconscious and gain insight into how you really feel and especially what you value. You'll be amazed at how effective it is. I'm of the opinion that a substantial share of ennui arises from a failure to commit to routine and honest introspection.

With respect to software, your feelings may stem from a perceived deficit in value creation. No matter what we do, we all want to feel like we're contributing in some way and we all try to find ways to achieve that. Could be blogging, OSS dev, teaching classes, turning an app into a business (or just putting it out there for people to use freely!), etc. If you're just hacking on things to learn, that's great and necessary. But you might be better served taking it a step further.

[oggyhead]

Thank you for the reply. The journaling part sounds very logical for anybody of any situation :) your words do ring a clarion Bell. Thank you so much

[marktangotango]

I'll piggyback on this and note it seems like you're self worth is tied up in some sort of uber coder thing. I can relate to a point. After I'd read Fred brooks and some other literature (specifically Weinberg) that talked about 10 or 100x programmers, and tied that with Paul Graham's beating the averages, I had this idea that a true uber programmer could reimplement some significant thing with enough cleverness, and suitably powerful language. A concrete example would be some 100x-er recreating Google in 6 months or something (this specific example is a bit flawed due to hardware and storage requirements but meh).

There are a lot of flaws with this line of reasoning, but mainly the activity of writing code becomes secondary to defining the problem domain and solution.