Ask HN: How to get back hacker's mentality and joy of coding
I&#x27;ll start by saying that, currently, I&#x27;m completely burned out so anything I say may be heavily influenced by that and not be helpful at all. Then again, being in this situation has me thinking about these things often, so maybe some of those thoughts might help. I wouldn&#x27;t count on it, but who knows...<p>So, anyway, one of the things I&#x27;ve been wondering most about this situation is this question: When I was younger, was I &quot;fascinated by technology&quot; or did I want to <i>do some things</i> &quot;which involved some technologies&quot;? That is, was technology itself the goal? And I don&#x27;t know about you, but in my case I&#x27;m certain technology was almost never the goal. Maybe some times I would indeed find joy in toying with some particular technology, but in general it was always about something I wanted to do which <i>usually</i> -but not always- involved technology.<p>That &quot;but not always&quot; was not a casual comment. It turns out I can enjoy other things which do not involve technology (surprising, uh?), or involved it only indirectly. In the last few years, maybe this last decade, I&#x27;ve been enjoying non-technology related activities which still allowed me to <i>do</i> things... to create or to achieve some goal. Like drawing and painting. I&#x27;m not very good at it, but I enjoy the whole process of it. About once a year, maybe a bit less, I&#x27;ve been building arcade machines. Sometimes I do all the work myself, others I just buy a -mostly complete- kit and build that. I usually end up selling them cheap or sometimes giving them away after playing with them for a while.<p>Anyway, it provides a sense of actually achieving something, even if it is of little importance or practical utility. So, my guess here is double: It&#x27;s not about the technology itself, and it doesn&#x27;t even <i>need</i> to be practical or useful.<p>It can be, though. One other thing I do is teach in various ways -mostly online these days-. This is a bit different. Not only because it is indeed useful, but also because the results have been more mixed. I help programmers in various ways. Sometimes it&#x27;s anonymous, or at least impersonal, just some random person asking for help on some website. Sometimes it&#x27;s people I personally know, friends, ex-colleagues, who ask me questions about something they are doing and have become stuck or just want a code review of some piece they don&#x27;t feel too confident with. I even tend to do this at work, when I&#x27;m working. I make an effort to make it easy for less experienced developers to ask me whatever they need to.<p>As I said, the results with this are mixed and this has been actually helpful. Sometimes people -mostly those random people on the internet- don&#x27;t even respond or acknowledge the help and this is a bit frustrating, not because I want gratitude or anything but because you just don&#x27;t know. Have I been helpful? Did I just waste my time for nothing? It&#x27;s hardly a joyful task. Some other people don&#x27;t seem to learn much. They come back some time later and ask the same or very similar questions. You see them not progressing and you feel like you&#x27;re not achieving anything. Which you do with other people, because you see them getting into more difficult or elaborate problems and you notice how they are indeed progressing.<p>Also, this <i>is</i> technology related. It&#x27;s about programming and software development. And I even do it <i>as part of my job</i> also.<p>So, anyway, thinking about how these things work out, I would conclude that clearly it was never about technology but about achieving <i>something</i>. Teaching is much more enjoyable when you do get the feeling that you&#x27;re indeed achieving something and helping someone.<p>With these ideas, but still pretty much burned out from a recent job, I&#x27;ve concluded:<p>- Focus on whatever you feel like. It can, but it doesn&#x27;t need to be &quot;useful&quot;. It helps for it to be of little importance.<p>- Focus on <i>doing something</i>, not on <i>trying some technology</i>. When I draw, I do try different mediums but I never think &quot;I&#x27;m going to try gouache&quot; or &quot;I want to try these markers&quot;. Instead it&#x27;s &quot;I&#x27;m going to draw <i>this</i>; let&#x27;s see how it turns out using these markers&quot;.<p>- Whenever possible, try to alternate. Try activities that achieve different sorts of goals, like painting -for myself- and teaching -for others-. Or like something physical and something more &quot;spiritual&quot; -or whatever word you prefer to use there-. This is just a personal impression I have, that the variety helps.<p>----<p>I&#x27;m sure I don&#x27;t need to say this but, of course, you may not like drawing in particular. Just try other things and find some you like.