The love of programming
2024-06-28 | 1 views
Do you still remember that first piece of code you wrote? I do, I was making a simple HTML website but it was so cool to see my work turn into an actual website. From that point on every new thing I learnt was another eye opening moment to the possiblities that programming offers nowadays. The amount of things there is to learn is almost endless and every time you learn something new you become better at what you do and a more valuable developer as a result of this. Isn't that amazing, you can do what you love and the more you do it the more you will probably get paid for it. Sadly not everyone thinks of it like this, but they did at one point. What happened?
Most developers start programming out of their own interest. The first couple of projects that you code are amazing but somewhere down the line when it has to be done 8 hours a day as a job it might start to feel like a grind, which is sad since the concept is still so fun. How to fix this?
Fun programming
I like to spend time on my own projects where I build things using tools that might not even be useful for my job. I find some tool online or read about a new programming language that has become popular and start thinking "what would be cool to make with this?" and then I start building somewhere that week. The goal should not be to learn something from it, but just to feed the curiosity of how it works. These kind of programming projects are in my opinion super important to keep programming fun and even though the goal is not to learn new skills, you will anyway.
This way I have also build up a decent portfolio on my Github with all different kinds of programming languages.
Finding what to make
There are a lot of different projects to throw yourself into and it depends greatly on where your interests lie what kind of projects are fun. From my own experience the following list contains the majority of small projects I have made over the year
Trying a new programming language, just try to make something easy
Trying a new framework, just make a small demo and compare it to how you would normally make it
Contributing to an open source project you have used for a while
Trying to create a simple proof of concept of a cool idea you had
Doing an online programming challenge, advent of code is a great place to start
Creating a tool to increase your productivity
These items can also be combined but I think at least one of these topics should give enough inspiration to start a new project for fun today!
Sustainability
As discussed in one of my other blogs about learning sustainably, I think another very important aspect about these projects is to not overdo it. If you have a very busy period where you cannot work on your project for 1 to 2 weeks or maybe a month that is fine. But I think everyone who says they do not have time at all over a long period of time is a liar. There is always an hour on sunday evening or somewhere else in the week where you could work on such projects. It is not about grinding it is about an adventure to feed your curiosity. So one hour every two weeks consistently is also fine, if that is enough to feed your curiosity of course.
Why?
Doing projects that are in programming languages that you do not use professionally or using tools that your place of work will never touch might feel like a waste of time to some people, but I think doing these fun projects is never a waste of time. Even if you disregard all the skills you will gain, a very valuable advantage is that it might reignite your love of programming. It will make the enjoyment of writing code increase and make those long days feel a lot shorter, maybe because you are looking forward to coding your own project again, but most likely because programming will be fun again.
Conclusion
Having fun projects is very important to not lose the love of programming, we all loved programming once and I find it sad to see this love fading in some developers. I think the best cure to losing this love is to make something you actually love and can call your own. It might not be a crazy advantages application, but a lot of pride can still be gained from something small that might be written in a crazy programming language or using a weird tool.