I find I get burned out by commercial code. So many hands have touched it, millions of lines, scant docs, hard to make sense of it, but ... deadlines, get this task done and that.
Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again!
I am having fun writing a simple nodejs app which is using AWS service. Nothing groundbreaking but its fun to learn and tinker with. I have no expectation of getting good at AWS or NodeJS, just want to build something and get it working.
Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again!
I found the opposite was useful. My day job was writing quite trivial code (crud apps, forms, etc) so I started writing far more complex apps in my spare time. Things that were truly challenging. It turns out they're a lot of fun to build.
My day job is fixing what should be trivial code that is ridiculously over complicated for what it is doing. Most apps are just a variation on CRUD, yet people manage to make this ridiculously complex.
There are two kinds of difficult I find. Difficult and rewarding (coming up with an elegant algorithm to solve a problem). Difficult but unrewarding. It doesn't take brainpower to solve these, just knowledge of lots of inconsistencies and a lot of trial end error. Interacting with Saleforce API and a lot of JavaScript / Browser work seems to fall into this category.
I can see that being true too. The parallel is your challenging code and my simple code have is that they are solo dev projects (presumably!) with little legacy, and you get to choose the direction you take them in.
I'd say write manageable programs.
The uglier the codebase gets, the more I hate coding it.
If the codebase is well-thought and easily extendable, coding is mostly fun and you get pleasure out of beautiful execution.
This got me thinking. I find that being repeatedly told not to clean up a system burns me out. To the extent that our programming is creative and enjoyable in its creativity, one must feel some sort of pride in the result in order to have any interest in its continuation. If you are being told to not clean things up or leave things in a messy state, you are left devoid of this sense of pride and joy in your work.
Best case, you can find pride and joy in something about your programming other than the technical excellence. However, that depends on you personally caring about the purpose of your code's existence.
Of course, left to their own devices, a bunch of engineers could be very happy and ship nothing useful. So you have to impose some sort of balance in a business environment. However, it's an interesting management problem to allow people enough time and autonomy to be proud of their work, while still accomplishing what needs doing. Ideally, with happy engineers, more gets done, and it pays off.
Yeah, this applies to any profession. People not only burnout because they have too much to do, but because of the stress of not being able to do their work well. It's a tough problem.
I find I get burned out by commercial code. So many hands have touched it, millions of lines, scant docs, hard to make sense of it, but ... deadlines, get this task done and that.
Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again!
I am having fun writing a simple nodejs app which is using AWS service. Nothing groundbreaking but its fun to learn and tinker with. I have no expectation of getting good at AWS or NodeJS, just want to build something and get it working.