Hobbies

For quite a long time programming was my main hobby. I enjoyed it, as I felt like I was creating something (hopefully) useful, and the problems I tried to solve were making my brain-cogs turn. However, recently it seemed to change, or at least, I’m feeling my usual burnout a bit harder than usual.

You may remember, recently I made a (now unlisted) post about taking a break from writing and thinking about what I want to do in the future with this blog. Most of the stuff there is still relevant, though I felt that the way I put it down was a bit off my usual style, so I unlisted it. This post is, somewhat, of a correction of these thoughts.

Not so long ago I had a change in my career. I’m still a software engineer, though now I will probably write less code, as I’m becoming a software architect. This has a lot of implications, because I have to learn a lot of new stuff, and my work now consists of lots and lots of thinking on all levels. It also means that the way I’m thinking has to change.

My programming, usually, consisted of throwing my brain against a problem and seeing what sticks. Rarely did I dig into the internals of stuff I was doing, research any prior art, or use known methodologies. It was fun, but it is not the proper way of doing things unless you’re working on something completely new. I used to think about it as my way of learning things, but honestly, it was more of a way to procrastinate.

After reading a few books on how to think properly, I decided that I needed to change the approach.

This resulted in an unusual amount of burnout in the last month, because now I have to think more about how things are done properly, and I have enough of it at work. My mental capacity is not as huge as it may seem, so after-work programming sessions started to feel like a burden, rather than fun activities. Well, for now at least.

So I decided that I should switch my hobbies from computers for a while. I’m now re-learning how to play guitar, and I finally went to the rock climbing gym. Gotta say, that these activities are as brain-intense as programming, or at least they feel like it. Though, I’m not sure if this blog is a fitting place to talk about both of these activities.

I’m still not giving up hope on gamedev though, so maybe after I’m more proficient with my current tasks I’ll return to programming, but I still think that I should limit my scope to one thing. Gamedev looks like the most fun one - I have enough data-processing tasks at work, so something interactive is more encouraging. Anyway, we’ll see. Maybe instead I’ll become a rock-climbing rock star, who knows?