I am a programmer by trade but i feel so lost at this point. I lve been in the industry for like 4 years and i feel like i barely know anything. In some respects i feel like my skills have actually regressed since college. I have cool project ideas but i never see them to fruition. Tried for years to make a game on my own but barely got anywhere with it owing a lot to my lack of art skills and inconsistency in actually working on it. Made a robot and got about 5 lines into leg IK and just... gave up. I was into AI for most of college and took tons of classes on it at the expense of a well rounded foundation in a diverse set of topics but i have significant barriers to getting a masters anytime soon and so no chance of getting an AI job. I dont think ive done a single interesting project w.r.t. modern AI despite wanting to, plus its hard to do computationally heavy things on a busted ass decade old laptop. Was in game dev professionally and while i was shielded from things like crunch it was deeply unsatisfying and i would spend a lot of time on my phone/slacking off. I only worked with clients twice - one went ok but the work sucked, the second time they put me on a contract by myself and i melted down, failed to deliver anything and pissed off the client. So they just kept me on internal stuff that will never see the light of day for the rest of the time i worked there. New hires would immediately get more responsibility than i ever had because they were just straight up more competent, talented employees and i suffered a great deal of imposter syndrome as a result despite trying to improve myself. Even with adderrall i just failed to get anything useful done or motivate myself except at the very very end when i did make a pretty neat feature that i was happy with even if it wasnt perfect.
Then I lost my job and for a while i really did try to like, do neetcode, refresh my dsa knowledge and such, work on projects. But 2 months passed and i received nothing but silence or the rare rejection on all of my job applications, nor have any of my former coworkers. More and more devs get laid off every week. I havent touched an IDE in over a month. I dont know what to do with myself really. Working in general just sucks for me (which is really privileged for me to say because ive barely worked hard a day in my life and have had everything handed to me) and its not what i like about coding. I hate agile, never have anything to say in code reviews, and feel no satisfaction from my work.
What do I do? I want to become something more than what i am, learn new things, learn how to hack stuff together and make cool gadgets and programs, hone my skills to the limits of what i can do. Become one with the net and the machine. But not for capitalism, not for money, not to work a dull corpo job until my brain rots and my soul withers and i get replaced by an intern with an AI. But when i try its like my brain is in a fog and my motivation dwindles and i abandon everything to go back to cheap stimulation.
Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite
I don't have any answers because I am going through a similar scenario to you; however, I do have a lot of not answers.
With the skills regression, I also felt like this for a long time and came to find out that I was burned out due to overworking; I have been working multiple jobs for a few years or so and I had a situation where I had like a couple weeks break from both jobs and a lot of it came back. That being said, by "it came back" I meant my wanting to work on my personal projects and actually being able to work on them. I think that skills regression is pretty normal, if you are not constantly practicing you will loose it, but it never completely goes away, you will always at least have a memory of what you did and if you need to do it again a quick lookup of how it works usually is enough to bring it back within a week or so. Like I haven't programmed in Java for years but I started working on a Minecraft mod for fun and it all came back slowly.
On your job. I'm sorry that happened to you. It seems to be a very common thing right now. The software market over the past few years has been extremely volatile. My work had their first layoffs ever a few years ago, and it was all at the same time that all the big corporate companies (Google, Microsoft, etc) were doing their layoffs, idk if it was just companies copying one another but it all boiled down to short term money gains. Even people who are Senior Devs were being rejected for new positions, not to mention positions that are fake (to keep stock prices high and to not scare investors), and ones that are phishing scams to steal your personal info. I can say it seems like the market is getting slightly better, but its too early to tell for sure.
About the "hacking stuff together" part. I think this is a very good mindset to be in, this is exactly where I was a number of years ago. I have come to view programming as a kind of art in itself, the same as poetry, or painting, or the like. (This is anecdotal, but I think very true) An artist that is forced to do art in a corporate setting will end up hating art until they take a step back and start doing art for themselves. So like for me, I program in a specific area but I have personal projects that are competently the opposite of what I do for work. Also that I have probably hundreds of dead projects that I abandoned after only a few hours to a weekend, I think thats also pretty normal, its the same as an artist keeping a sketchbook, it doesn't exist to be a masterpiece, just to do a little practice on something. Also what makes a good project is not the amount of code, or how clever it is, or how you rolled your own fibonacci tree, its how useful it is, even if it is simple or trivial. One project I really like is tinywm; it is like 60 lines of code, and has had a bunch of other projects spawn off of it.
I would second what lillypad said that working on an open source project is a good idea as well. You can show companies on your CV that you are working on a "real project" while giving your time to help a project that really needs developers. Also learning new programming languages (even if they are pointless) is good for you as a developer as they will allow you to see different ways of thinking about the same problem, and make you a better programmer by broadening your mind as to what is possible. I can recommend the Rosetta Code project and Programming Languages dot info for all things programming language related.
Im not sure what "your thing" will be but I can give some of my inspirations, maybe one might help.
One is Plan9. I tell developers about plan9 (way too much) its like the exact opposite of all modern computing. Its a weird, old, clunky; and yet paradoxically simple, elegant, and powerful. Its like a window into another universe where things went differently. Its easy to do hard things and hard to do easy things. Try to change the color of text for your text editor will probably be an hours long dig into documentation and code. Try to mount the sound card of a completely separate computer on your current one? trivial, takes like 5 seconds. Its a very distraction free OS, it lets you really focus on what you are doing. SDF has a free bootcamp they do sometimes that is a good start as to what plan9 is like.
One inspiration I have found this artist/programmer who is in the unix/bsd/plan9 space called unix_surrealism whos manifesto? (of sorts) I will link here. It gets you into a good headspace I think. I find their art interesting and funny.
Another inspiration I have is Hundred Rabbits who created the uxntal language and varvara VM (to name a few things). They seem to be the perfect blend of art and programming.
Haha well def havent been overworking
I agree with programming being an art and i think thats what i want out of it. Out of life anyway. Something... more? Im having trouble formulating my thoughts but its like magic to me. A communion of soul and machine through self expression. I feel like ive only scratched the surface of whats possible.
I'll check out some of the stuff you linked. Sounds interesting
I feel like we've all barely scratched the surface of what's possible tbh
For the overworking thing, its more that it led to my burn out this time around. It doesn't necessarily have to be working that leads to burn out. During the pandemic I had burnout that lasted for 2 years that also didn't have anything to do with overworking but just stress and having a manager that didn't support the dev team very well and a bunch of other factors. so more or less what I was trying to say is take it easy on yourself. When I tried to force myself into "doing coding challenges" or what people say you are "supposed to do" to get a job I have found that it only make my burnout worse.