Ask HN: Have You Burned Out?
My burnout cure is to do exactly whatever I want until I&#x27;m not burned out. Maybe that&#x27;s coding. Maybe it&#x27;s the motorcycle. Maybe it&#x27;s watching dumb YouTube videos. Maybe it&#x27;s helping build a barn. Whatever I want.<p>The worst bout took me about a year to get over. Quit my job and rode my mountain bike a lot. I realized that if I tried to force myself back into some project, I&#x27;d just procrastinate and remain unhappy. So I only worked on whatever it was I wanted to work on that day. I&#x27;d actively ask myself &quot;What do I want to do?&quot; instead of &quot;What should I be doing?&quot;<p>That might sound selfish... and it is. 100% selfish. But I get burned out from giving more than I get, so sometimes I have to make time for myself to balance it out. Fair&#x27;s fair.<p>I was doing a lot of stuff with GPS tracks because I love maps (cheap consumer GPSes were a relative novelty at the time). And I was processing one with a program called Viking when I noticed that Viking supported a new basemap layer: OpenStreetMap. What&#x27;s that, I wondered? And then I got hooked, mapping my area which barely had any data (the Bay Area barely had any OSM data, if you can imagine!). And virtually no cities were named in the US on the map. But I could get the GNIS city name and location data... all that was needed was to write a Python script to import it all through the OSM API.<p>Of course there were some cities in OSM already, so I had to search to make sure I didn&#x27;t replace any existing ones that were relatively close in location and name. And of course some were misspelled in one dataset or the other, so I used Levenshtein distance to look for closeness.<p>That was the first program I wrote after my year-ish off. And it was fun again! And I got there by doing what I wanted to.<p>A few months later, I took some part time contract work, paid hourly. It was a great way to dip back in.