How do you stay motivated to keep building code?

cover image by Berend Eikelenboom

Sometimes it's hard to keep working, how do you keep up that energy?

Comments

[Ian Pride]

Appreciate the video. I know it can be a tough burn-out for those of you who get paid to do it.

I don't need to stay motivated to code, I need to stay motivated to only work on one project at a time lol! Not being completely facetious either.

I have plans to eventually re-write all core common (GNU especially) utilities for my own sort-of cross-platform utility package and it will probably never be finished! But I have enough coding to last me for a life time!

But then again lots of newer devs wouldn't consider me a "programmer" or "developer" since I've barely ever been paid to do it, but I've been coding almost daily for over 20 years with thousands of CLI's and a couple of handfuls of GUI's all over the internet!

[ヘンタイちゃん]

If you can code, then you're a developer. There's usually a difference between 'developers who code in their free time' and 'professional developers who produce code for a company' in terms of quality, but that's not always necessarily true. With 20 years of personal experience, you should qualify as a developer regardless.

[Ian Pride]

Oh I know. I actually keep up with what's going on in the industry; I won't got into it too much, but it's one of the main reasons I don't want to do it for a living...

...'professional developers who produce code for a company' in terms of quality, but that's not always necessarily true. - needless to say I haven't been 100% happy with the direction the software industry has been going for a long time and I'll leave it at that. Not to bring my problems here, but I have spent plenty of my time being demeaned and flooded with pretentious condescension by people who probably should've never got a degree and yet here we are... This attitude I have towards it is more of a defense mechanism at this stage (not that I even really care... much lol).

As for quality, I take pride in everything I do and I'm truly borderline OCD and definitely a perfectionist and I know very well that while I might NOT be a genius that I have quality work!!! No one sees my crappiest work because I don't show it lol.

I could rant on and on so I'll just stop now lol. Thanks for the encouragement!

[myleftshoe]

Agreed, I left professional development years ago but retain daily coding as a hobby. As a hobby you can work on what you like, how you like, and if you're a perfectionist that likes elegant, readable code, you can take the time tweaking for beauty and simplicty both in form and function rather than feel pressured to push code out the door.

[Jose Luis Ramos T.]

Soy principiante, recién inicio en el aprendizaje autónomo de lenguajes web. Uno de mis primeras reglas que tengo para ser productivo en todo trabajo y codificación, es dormir bien. Si te sientes bien serás doblemente productivo.