Anyone else really struggle with motivation?

Time was back when I was a fresh dev that I couldn’t stop coding, it’s all I ever wanted to do.

I think doing it for a job has sucked the fun out of it, and unless I’m getting paid (and even then), I find actually getting down to it is really difficult.

I’ll start looking into making something, perhaps get as far as opening the IDE and then just nope’ing and bingeing YouTube / gaming / Netflix instead.

I hope that this won't happen to me.
I already know that feeling from programming for a mc server were sometimes the most productive thing would be to negate an If-statement to fix a bug.

What I felt, was the reason, is the lack of change and learning.
When I started digging python (understanding it, toying around, doing projects like AoC) it felt like being reborn.
Beeing able to seamless continue older projects in Kotlin also helped a lot.

Also: Sometimes little changes can have great effect, like:
- Changing the IDE
- Changing the color scheme (or even a light theme for a short time)
- Improving the workflow

I also like to learn the basics of a programming language more deeply instead of some Lib/Framework that uses the same basics, but adds a bunch of abstraction and often unecessary extra features/complexity on top of it.

I am in the same boat lad, work sucks so much out of ya that one can only wonder if the soul is still there ...

I try to fight it with personal projcts that actually bring challenges and are interesting whatever just to get away from the dumb problems I have to deal with at work.

just add an additional check here and there argue with "engineers" it is reaaaaly frustrating but open source solves that you can ignore dumb comments and have a really good chance to work on something you like with people who actually use their heads outside of PMs telling them 'do this there and that else where'

Heck the feeling I've got when a guy from M$ referenced my vscode extension in a official report for azure or noticing a star from another on said extension on GH really brings back the joy of things

@dev-nope yeah. Back in the day I had a project featured on a channel 9 blog series and that was great.

I might get more involved in OSS, I’ve got a project I want to make but it’s getting the motivation to read the paper and implement it etc.

I’ve never done the whole read a paper and build something process, it’s daunting and imposter syndrome is so real lol

I'm coding for nearly 22 years and had those bad cycles often. You need to give your brain something different on a regular basis. Get yourself a second hobby which is completely different from coding and you will see it will work. You will even be more inspired and start to think more broad.

I know how it feels, I do a lot of simple WordPress updates most days and it's hard to keep myself motivating when I could be solving real problems. I need an interesting project to work on so that motivation bleeds over into the other projects.

Same here. I've got bored quickly. Just programming some UI or business logic does not make me happy anymore. Learnings new APIs felt like 'Oh geez... Another way of doing things for no (good) reason.' I've escaped from programming stuff for daily stuff and moved to algorithm development. I really enjoy it. But in your case it depends on your personal preferences. My solution doesn't automatically apply on you. 💗