I am professionally a software developer for 8 years and I simply don’t have ideas for personal projects (Can’t find any problem that I can fix with programming). At times I feel like that’s natural and I shouldn’t worry about it. But on the other hand, I do like to imagine having something personal that I can work on so that even if some days on my main job are not satisfying, I can always work on my hobby project and find that missing satisfaction.
End goal here is obviously to get better sleep as sometimes my mind feels dissatisfied with the day’s work.
Funnily, I day-dream about the idea of already having done the boring parts (simply manifesting a project that already exists) of some personal project and only solving exciting problems in relation to adding a new feature or exciting aspects.
This creates a problem as I hate staring at a blank file not knowing what to write.
Why do we devs have this weird need to do our jobs in our free time. We put this weird career specific cultural pressure for some reason.
Do other careers have this need to do work in your free time? You don’t see brick layers itching to work on building a little house on the side, or lawyers just looking for a case to practice on.
Why is it just devs?
Why is it just devs?
Because, (and not sure about your upbringing, speaking for myself and possibly those who agree) we entered the field because of our dream to get paid for what is effectively hours of our favourite activity: tinkering with our home computer (that dad forbade us from touching as we often broke something) and building cool stuff. I still remember the day I used Turbo C compiler to compile the “Hello, World!” program and the feeling of seeing the result made me happy and excited. My immediate thought was “what else can I do with this!”.
I often tried implementing graphics in turbo C. The horrors of trying to find the cause of out of bound scribbling mess that my drawing code produced is quite nostalgic to this day.
I guess most of the current struggle is to just reproduce that joy that we got once.
Not having any personal projects is perfectly fine. Don’t worry about it. Not everyone has to have their job as their hobby. Try other things (music, hiking, cooking, etc.). Try to find a hobby that makes you happy (if you don’t already have one). That’s way more important than having a public GitHub profile. And if a company decided not to hire you because of that, you basically dodged a bullet.
Whatever you do, don’t start down the path of customizing a Linux distro.
Started messing with NixOS in December and it has been the bittersweet curse of a never ending things to do.
- More and more of my config now tracks 0 day releases with custom bug fixes.
- Started writing my own Gnome Shell.
- Started adding support to my favorite TypeScript framework for GJS (Gnome JS) for my shell.
- Started writing a a parser combinator to parse GJS stack traces.
- Started writing custom source map library for GJS so I know where my errors are.
- Started writing a custom test runner because none of the modern ones work on GJS.
- Started writing widgets for my new shell.
- My veovim config is now its own software suite.
- Started writing syntax tree parsers for poorly supported query languages we use at work.
- Coding style is enforced with huge linter rule configs and custom plugins.
- Sleep is now at 75% of what it was.
- My wife is now working double what she did because I’m always busy.
- My kids think I’m crazy.
- My work has doubled their expectations because they think I’m some inhuman wizard.
- The walls of reality are crumbling down.
- Brb my morning NixOS update is failing to build (again).
Whatever you do, don’t start down the path of […] Started messing with […] in December and it has been the bittersweet curse of a never ending things to do.
Sounds like… any and every project? 😅
Brb my morning NixOS update is failing to build (again).
When
nixos-rebuild switchsuddenly starts compiling GHC, firefox, CEF, or some other large package and you have to find the damn package that caused that rebuild. Always a good time.
Get a notepad, logseq, send yourself messages in Signal, or record audio of whatever idea you have at that moment.
- “Just browsed an interesting repo on $sourceforge and they are missing linting, maybe I should create a PR”
- “What if this thing happened automatically when I logged in / opened the website / this even happened?”
- “The kids have been complaining about slow $something, I’m sure it’s because of $cause, gotta check that out”
Hell, maybe write a website where people can send ideas of things they’d like implemented. Others could add tags and emojis, indicate that they’re working on it, or share existing implementations, or whatever other feature you can think. Then people looking for stuff to do could filter by stuff like “most popular”, “most $emoji”, by tag(s), by number of people implementing, etc.
Maybe even build in a system where people can vote on the implementation and have a leaderboard for the people with most reacted to ideas, people with highest rated implementations, etc.Then you’ll have to think about how not to game the system, maybe allow people to put a bounty on ideas, and so on and so forth.
