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?
Plenty of people who work in construction trades do projects at home for their own benefit. They might even go to a workshop and learn about new techniques, materials, and tools.
Plenty of professions have practitioners learn and read on their own time to increase their knowledge and value in the labor market.
It’s not unique to software development. But there is a lower barrier in software development to being able to use one’s free time to work on skills and projects in terms of physical materials and social coordination.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Are you physically active? If no, then I’d suggest taking up a sport. Whether alone or with others, physical activity is extremely important, and it can be a rewarding hobby.
If that’s already covered, then I’d ask: would you prefer to have a hobby that you do alone, or with a group?
For group hobbies, you can browse meetup.com, that’s how I found my table-top RPG group, and we’ve been having loads of fun together for…about 15 years now.
(TTRPGs are my favorite, pathfinder 2e is the best ever)
For alone hobbies, I’d say the most important aspect is stay away from the screen. Music is a common one, or another type of art. Painting can be extremely rewarding, even if you have no talent.
I like to do MOC lego projects. (basically, use legos to make your own creations) I build mecha out of lego technic and bionicle/star wars parts.
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? 😅
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)
lol its no joke when you start joining drops for keysets.
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.
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)
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.
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
Think about what you wish existed, then make it exist/make sure it exists.
I have a bachelors. Masters degree seems worthwile but also not. I do like learning about hard compsci problems and trying to implement naive but funny “solvers” that crash the desktop.
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.
