I feel this. My approach has been to drop programming as a hobby honestly. I’ve learned to work on my car, did a kitchen remodel, took dancing classes… fucking anything where I don’t have to look at a screen really.

Game mods and Advent Of Code did it for me.

I did a small RimWorld mod and a parser for NoManSky internal format.

Creating both of them was a blast. I had fun doing programming stuff again.

Advent Of Code allowed me to try different languages in a small bursts of the different problems. Somehow I really like this format.

I like to just tackle little things using technologies I haven’t used before. Write a small application in a new language to do something simple, and keep the project small in scale. You get the satisfaction of building something and of learning a new skill, with no pressure, and you get to know whether you like the language or framework. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t do anything groundbreaking or clever, and doing this just keeps your wheels turning while carving out a little bit of creative computing space for yourself, not your employer.

Also consider open-source software you use daily (because that will motivate you) and check out their repos to see if you feel like starting to get involved.

Or bite off something completely different in tech, like robotics or electronic musical instruments.

And if you’re just tired of tech, that’s fine and you may just need a contrasting activity you can do at home. Then at least your work doesn’t become your life.

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Use opensource software. Once you start discovering bugs that you can fix, it might start being fun again?

Self hosting a bunch of shit makes me feel like I’m really sticking it to the man

Userscripts are tiny and make the web better for you and others. Downside: Javascript. It’s not awful, but hoo boy, it is not great.

Itch.io game jams are nice little doses of panic for creative output. I tend to go for low-end systems because on some level I’m still offended there weren’t more pseudo-3D games on 8- and 16-bit hardware. Downside: if you’re not using bare-metal C, it’s because you’re using assembly.

I recommend the Game Boy family. GB/C has a lovely compiler in GBDK and the hardware is hilariously forgiving. GBA supports C++, somehow, and is basically a modern ARM device with the worst specs imaginable. But it’ll do any 2D bullshit you can imagine, no sweat, and there’s bitmap modes if you insist on 3D the hard way.

DOS is also weirdly flexible, and Open Watcom will cross-compile from everywhere. Try to make anything good-looking on MDA / Hercules cards and a 4.77 MHz 8088. Do some voxel heightmaps on 386 and CGA. Thumb your nose at Windows 95 and do fancy lighting in software VGA. Some maniac out there is gonna run it on real hardware.

I have three broadly-applicable and closely-related mantras from game jams:

• Always be shipping. Achieve minimum viable product as soon as possible, so all future work is tweaking. Tweaking is easy. Tweaking can go until the last minute, and is easy to shrug off if it doesn’t work. Implementing a pause function will humble you if you put it off.

• Different ideas go in the next project. You want this overhead title to be third-person? Well, cut that shit out, and make a note for next time. Don’t Daikatana yourself.

• Failure is an option. It is perfectly okay to pull the chute and admit things won’t come together in the next, oh, twelve hours. It’s just a game. You’re just doing it for yourself. And if you give a shit beyond whatever contest you wanted to submit for, you can just keep working on it, later.

None of this is stress-free. But it’s the kind you control, with more reward than punishment. And it’s not a high-stakes zero-sum game about who can take the most adderall.

Switch your stack. Try mobile or embedded development. Or dive into system programming. Something that is interesting for you but what you did not try before.

If you want to have some fun again, maybe program a little with artsy-fartsy shaders.

Make a little blog that showcases them and write a little animation everyday - or twice a week.

I’ve seen also “shadplay” which lets you easily write and run shaders using rust. There was also this other tool where people could live-code shaders, but I forgot the name

I find embedded stuff fun.

Here’s a single line of code, and it has distinct outcomes you can see, without 48 layers of abstractions and guardrails.

what kind of projects or whatever can i do to have fun again without feeling stressed.

• Write programs that scratch your own itch.
• write bots for communities you care about.
• write userscripts/browserextentions
• do programming/hacking challenges

(for stuff that is always online, like a bot, or a webservice, I recommend getting a dedicated computer, like a raspberry pi or a small vps)

also some general recommendation

• keep you goals small and tangible. If a thing takes more than one sitting to complete, it will add to your stress when you add the remainder to your todo list.
• do the simplest thing, that could possibly work.
• when doing new stuff, use chatgpt to come up with a plan/boilerplate/demo/2nd opinion.

from personal experience: before I went to college, I had lots of fun doing programming challenges. During college I lost all interest in programming. At my first real job, I regained my love for programming, when I started programming things, that actual people need to improve their daily work. Since then I enjoy programming for work, as well as in my free time.

I found FinTech soul sucking.

The technology is cool, but most of the people I encountered in management were assholes.

What is your programming language? Build something for yourself, you’ll feel good. May be some todo list script, may be some youtube new video notification script, you get the idea. The fun in programming is making the machine do what you want, and it helps if you actually want it.

I’ve made something that’s both fun and challenging: https://cyb.farm

It’s a tech adventure featuring many challenges about computer science stuff (crypto, stegano, protocols, development, …). It starts on the 31^st of October, and will probably can keep you busy for a few weeks ^^

Honestly, I don’t think more of the same is going to help you feel less burned out. Obviously your couple of sentences doesn’t give me a lot of insight into your life, but you do not seem to enjoy your job, and that is going to color your whole perception on anything related to it. I think I’d honestly recommend you start looking for work you actually enjoy, but if that isn’t possible I recommend unplugging as much as possible for awhile. That’s the only way I’ve ever had the spark come back for me. Starting side projects always lose their luster after a session or two and just started to feel like another source of stress for me.