Slashdot Mirror
Keeping Programming Fun?
nb caffeine asks: "Having recently graduated, and now working as a developer, I've discovered that after 9 hours of programming at work, I have little interest in coming home and working on my personal programming projects. I've become upset with this fact, because while I was in college, I spent quite a bit of time working on personal projects for my own use. I also noticed this trend during my summer internship, and I have a feeling that it isn't going to get any better. It's not to say that I don't get to work with cool technologies at my job, but they aren't anything that I would pick up in my spare time. So, how do my fellow programming geeks balance work related projects and personal projects? Or, if you've already discovered that after 9 hours of programming, the last thing you want to see is a computer, what hobbies does the Slashdot crowd enjoy after they've ruined their hobby by turning it into a job?"
Well what do you know, i did exactly the same. In fact i sold the TV set with it too. You wanna know what happened, i suddenyl had this tremedous amount of time to use in reading, going to a gym, learning new stuff.. its beautiful. All of my mates wonder how am i living without a TV set, i tell them its a pleasure you would never know. I second this solution, out of experience.
The lunatic is in my head
I try to start my workday and finish my workday with some personal projects. Sometimes I have had employers who encouraged working on a fun project at work, sometimes I needed to work on something 'work-related', but generally it had to be fun. I would use these projects as a warm up and a cool down from the brunt of my work programming. I found that it would get my head into 'programming space' with something enjoyable, and at the end of the day, let me leave thinking about my fun work and not the hard slog of the day. Keeps your brain healthy!
in my case, as well as many of my of my fellow English Lit majors, we were the kids who HAD to read 24/7...until courses required us to cram Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, etc. like they were forgettable movies-of-the-week and many of us couldn't even stand to read mindless summertime fiction anymore...the hard choice may be deciding do you want to enjoy coding because it puts food on your table or do you want to enjoy it because it remained a hobby...myself and many of my peers chose to find new careers rather than lose the love of reading (coding in your case...)
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson