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.
I’ve recently gotten into codewars.com a bit. (Not for a lack of personal projects.) I can recommend you try it.
The kind of projects that could fit depends on various things. What kind of projects would be of interest to you? Visual? 3D rendering? Algorithms? Utilities? Desktop software? Web? Known or new technologies? Which ones?
If your dissatisfaction is rooted on your current job, try looking into the market. Maybe it’s a good time to jump to another ship.
As for hobbies, I agreed with everyone. Try activities away from the keyboard, it would probable be the most healthy for both body and mind (and they correlate)
Think about what you wish existed, then make it exist/make sure it exists.
Creative people consistently say that they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to create. They just work on something. Often something nonsensical and useless. Sometimes something that’s meant to practice something they want to improve upon. Sometimes it’s half of an idea. Almost always it’s something that won’t ever be finished. In the process of working on whatever it is they’re engaged in, they get ideas for the next thing they want to work on. That’s how ideas come. Not from thinking about what the next idea will be, but by being engaged with an existing idea.
An easy way to start is to start journaling. Write down something good that happed during your day. Elaborate on it. Write your thoughts. Don’t edit them or care about spelling or grammar. Just engage with your existing thoughts.
If you want to build stuff but are struggling to motivate yourself, take a walk or go exercise and stop thinking about it for a bit. Sometimes that helps me. I’m in the same boat. I tend to work on a lot of things but I have a treasure trove of 10%-50% completed projects.
Lately, I’ve used ChatGPT 3.5 to help me figure out ideas or work through places I’m stuck.
I’ve gone to 4 conferences in the past 6 months. Most of the open source devs there that made big waves in the community are actually doing their jobs and their company open sourced their work. React, by way of example, is a Meta project that was open sourced.
So, sometimes, the intimidating projects have someone working full-time on them. So don’t feel like you should try to accomplish that.
As other people said, if you end up not being interested in doing development in your free time, don’t worry about it. It’s normal and fine to just go home and enjoy your life.
Live your life and if you encounter a problem that can be solved with programming, great.
If not, then you’ll live a good life.
Zero downsides
I should probably say that I’m more of a product manager these days so I don’t think I feel quite the pressure you feel to have an impressive git backlog but at one point I did feel that way
I’ll get asked by fresh college grads all the time what I’m working on at home and It’ll take me a second to realize what they’re talking about bc I haven’t worked on a real non-work related project at home in years
If anything I’ll get new devs who I’ll invite to lunch and they’ll be nervous so I try to break the ice by asking what have they been up to or what their hobbies are. They’ll start speed running through their list of pretty obviously pointless github projects that remind me of the fluff ones I did when I first started. It’s adorable
The only personal projects that ever get my attention are the ones that the person describing them is obviously passionate about. You’ll see them grinning ear to ear when telling you how many hours it took to fix a bug.
This is a very ranty way of saying that you shouldn’t stress about projects at home. I was told early on that social skills carry you further than technical skills which is probably bullshit but I was never going to be an amazing coder so let me have this one
I had a similar issue, and I started volunteering. Turns out I just needed to fix the feeling of not doing enough, rather than actually increasing the amount of things I do in a day.
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 customizing a Linux distro.
Welp, I am already done with that one in my 20s. I guess I should have specified, I had at one point a running arch install that I used as a daily driver. My main session was xfce and I was tinkering with some openbox stuff. Long story short, an update bricked my arch install. Being a noob and also not having the power of nix back then, I basically lost all my configs and dotfiles.
Thankfully I never tinkered in Gentoo ever. I might try it out this year just as a bucket-list thing.
Nowadays, If I want to run arch I am running Endeavor OS.
(PS: I will try to one up you a more dangerous habit: Mechanical Keyboards. Thankfully my cheapskate-ass won’t let me fall into this trap as much as I want to buy one… did I tell you I already have 2 of those in the house?)
I guess we are in reverse timelines. I’ve built about 10 keyboards, but its been about 5 years since I built my last one.
The Iris is my favorite.
WHY DID YOU SHOW ME YOUR KEEBS! I don’t wanna be broke man! tryin’ to avoid ruining my bank account! (/s and sorry for screaming 9 months later)
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.
