after a grueling 4 years of school and a bit of time at a fintech company ive lost almost all the enjoyment i once had for computers in high school. what kind of projects or whatever can i do to have fun again without feeling stressed.
edit: thanks everyone for such creative suggestions!! anything else on the internets just like build a trivia game teehee but yall put real thought into this shit, thank you!!
I'd suggest you go back to the roots, and find a language that allows for the usage of uppercase letters.
Use opensource software. Once you start discovering bugs that you can fix, it might start being fun again?
Game mods and Advent Of Code did it for me.
I did a small RimWorld mod and a parser for NoManSky internal format.
Creating both of them was a blast. I had fun doing programming stuff again.
Advent Of Code allowed me to try different languages in a small bursts of the different problems. Somehow I really like this format.
Switch your stack. Try mobile or embedded development. Or dive into system programming. Something that is interesting for you but what you did not try before.
If you want to have some fun again, maybe program a little with artsy-fartsy shaders.
Make a little blog that showcases them and write a little animation everyday - or twice a week.
I've seen also "shadplay" which lets you easily write and run shaders using rust. There was also this other tool where people could live-code shaders, but I forgot the name
Infinite respect to those who know the deep magic of shader programming
Also check out creative coding which is pretty similar to shaders, but has a lower entry barrier IMO
I used to do a ton with Processing and P5. This guy https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain did wonders for my skill and enjoyment a few years ago. I owe him a lot
I find embedded stuff fun.
Here's a single line of code, and it has distinct outcomes you can see, without 48 layers of abstractions and guardrails.
I've been doing AdventOfCode puzzles lately. Also hacking is pretty fun and teaches a lot about programs and tools out there. Do it ethically though, on platforms like HackTheBox or HackThisSite.
I've made something that's both fun and challenging: https://cyb.farm
It's a tech adventure featuring many challenges about computer science stuff (crypto, stegano, protocols, development, ...). It starts on the 31st of October, and will probably can keep you busy for a few weeks ^^
What is your programming language? Build something for yourself, you'll feel good. May be some todo list script, may be some youtube new video notification script, you get the idea. The fun in programming is making the machine do what you want, and it helps if you actually want it.
Don't program (as much). Point yourself towards DevOps, SRE, and/or Platform Engineering. You'll be designing complex systems and will have your hands in dozens of different tech stacks.
Sometimes I think a straight dev job would be interesting but I legitimately love the SRE space.
We focus a lot more on production than the average developer. It's our job to make sure whatever devs build is run quickly, efficiently, safely, and scalably.
You will work with a lot of kubernetes, Argo, terraform, Prometheus, grafana. You'll design build pipelines and software rollout strategies. You plan for zero downtime migrations and upgrades, database maintenance.. You'll have your hands in everything from capacity planning to security to cost optimization to developer support.. User permissions, infrastructure, networking, observability.. You will write RFCs and setup POCs for new tools. You define and track error budgets and figure out how to keep your org under those projections. When there is an outage you will be involved in writing post mortems.
The days are so varied and unpredictable that it keeps things interesting. The landscape changes so often you're never really stuck doing the same thing over and over.
I genuinely love it.
EDIT: The SRE Podcast from Google is actually really great for learning about this world. The first season talks about what you'll be doing and why (based around the SRE O'Riley book). The second season talks about what to expect in different stages of your career progression.
