[banbangtuth]

I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.

I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.

I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.

I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.

Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.

[moltar]

I was in a similar situation a few years back. I wasn’t only focusing on CRUD, but it was a large part of my work too. Mostly working on web-based SaaS projects.

I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.

[caro_kann]

Looks like I'm in that path you've already passed. From January I have to learn CDK because my current job requires me to do. Also planning on to obtain those AWS Cloud Certificates.

[hsuduebc2]

Heh same here. Get stuck in crud apps because it's easy, comfy and well paid. I would like to start something entirely different than computer related but I'm limited to a flat. So something like mushroom growing, or hydroponics seems good.

Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho. Anyway happy new year!

[ryanchants]

I had a lot of with Code Crafters. It's a paid platform, but they give you a basic walk through of different technologies, with full test suites. For example, you implement some basic Redis. It doesn't spoon feed you what to do, but breaks it down into manageable chunks.

https://codecrafters.io/

[handoflixue]

Build a few simple applications for yourself!

Pick a language you love, and put together a text editor, or even just a quick utility to search through all your files for a keyword and show the results in a window. Write your own Clock app for Android, just to fix that little niggling detail that no other app quite gets right.

I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to put things together, once you start.

The point isn't to build something anyone else would care about - don't worry about the polish, you don't need to publish it, you don't even need to use it yourself. The point is just to make something. Although, personally, I now have a collection of random utilities that all make my life a little bit better, and it's nice knowing that any time a simple app like "Clock" or "Calculator" bugs me, I COULD fix it.

[kondov]

I feel the exact same way and my career path and years in the industry are pretty much the same as well. What's usually blocking me from giving other programming niches a try is that I can't imagine ever building something in them that people actually use. Everything I've studied so far has been grounded in practicality and building a compiler, for example, seemed like something that only a select few can build with good quality.

Anyway, I got the "Writing An Interpreter In Go" book and I think I'll give it a shot either way. I think I'm at a point in my career where I'm finally tired of building the same things again and again. I've also been thinking about doing a design course in Interaction Design Foundation just to get my mind interested in things again and detach myself from the work I've been doing.