Most days I leave all the programming stuff at work, where (for me), work belongs.
I make it a point to not focus on work at home. Since I work for an employer, that effort I perform for them is to build someone else’s dreams. So I leave work at work, striving, never to let it interfere with my personal life – my dreams, my hobbies, or especially my time with my family.
Occasionally though, I do hit the books at home for some fun learning. This is usually to delve into something that I want to learn about technology which rarely coincides with anything regarding programming skills that I need on my job.
See I got into coding as a teenager, for fun. It was fun to solve problems which I thought were interesting and to create things I wanted to make. Back then, in the 80’s, heck I never thought someone would pay me to have fun like that.
And not to be too cynical but most jobs don’t. They pay you as a programmer to do what you’re told. Be creative on a schedule. Perform at a certain level and on-command because people are watching.
Kinda the opposite of fun and creative.
So for some actual fun, I’m going through a book right now that I’m really enjoying called Learn iOS 10 in Swift 3 by Devslopes. It’s really been good and it felt great to get through 11 chapters of it in one sitting today. If you’d like to pick up some mobile development skills, I highly recommend the book.
It’s fun 🙂
As developers, sometimes we can forget to have fun with what we do.
Worse yet we can convince ourselves that always building something we’re told to do by our employer is “fun”. It can be, sure. But I would warn it should not be our only source of fun with code.
If you have ever wondered, “where did the fun go in coding?”, then perhaps give this a chance. Find something to practice, experiment, and enjoy doing with code that doesn’t benefit your actual job. Tinker with code that interests YOU. Rediscover WHY you started down this path in the first place.
Heck, build a bunch of “hello world” or “to do” list apps and post em on Github and not care what the code looks like. Let down your geek-hair (if you still have some) and live a little.
They say if you let your passion become your job you’ll never work a day in your life.
I agree with that but offer some caution.
Bring passion (in whatever form that takes for you) to your work but don’t let your work rob of your passion to create and have fun.
If you ever started coding “for fun”, never let coding “for work” take away the fun.