In the evenings, after the kids go to sleep, I work on my side-project, an app that lets you preorder coffee from the local cafe so you don't have to wait so long. I've been working on it for six months and I dream of the day I can quit the day job and work on it full time.
… but don’t give me hate… I still code with my hands :)
I grew up programming and being obsessed with computers too, though in a very different world. I started working full time as a programmer this year and I haven't written a line of code. I just set the agent going and read reminiscent posts on HN like this about how great things used to be.
I feel like most of what I loved about programming has disappeared just as I truly began.
I also found that my brain has treated problem solving and building in general like gaming where every roadblock/problem/issue is like a level boss, and release to production is when you clock the game :)
So even if you’re spending 99% of your time in an agent cli rather than your editor, look at the problem you’re working on as a problem in itself and your task is to golf it - but as in one-shot prompts, but how can you do it to the best of your ability with sharp prompting.
But yeah, like a sibling comment said - keep it fun. I think if you get to serious then it takes the fun out of it… you’re no longer problem solving, you’re just stepping through the motions.
Oh… and also - treat everything like a learning experience and with the fascination like discovering Narnia... because If you’re not learning/growing/stressing even just a little in your current job, move on! You’re not doing yourself any favours staying stagnant… or maybe that’s terrible advice and I’m just addicted to constant fight-or-flight, high cortisol, and caffeine
I think I always had fun learning all the little knobs that a programming language would give you and where they made solving problems easier or more elegant.
You can get the same joy from working with an LLM when you have things setup correctly for example and you can say "handle these boring tickets for me" and if just "works" and works well.
Since the subject of BBS has been raised, I wanted to mention BBS-over-teletext, which used the bidirectional CATV connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Uses They never took off, owing to the difficulty of typing with a remote control, but at least they did not hog the phone line, or rack up a bill.
Fast forward a few years, my mom, who was a teacher at the time brought home the materials from an HTML class she took. She never did anything with it, but I made a few Geocities pages.
I skipped over the whole Myspace customization thing because I was too busy fooling around with Arduinos. I ended up making a controller for the veggie oil system in my car using what I learned.
Lucky for me, I waited until about 2020 to start getting serious about doing it for a living, right as the bottom fell out of the industry, and here I am.
My first program was in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe in basic. It was a program to check if a word was worth a dollar (a=1, b=2, c=3...)
It became a family activity (every one taking turns at the computer) every night to just type in words and see what they came out to. It was all very boring.
I was sure I was going to win.
I lost (well 2nd place), to the kid with 6 older brothers, who had that many years of building out the family list.
BBSs were how I learned everything because there wasn’t really anybody near me in my little rural area of the world that had a computer let alone knew how to program them. Internet wasn’t public yet, just getting out of the lab.
What I grew up in was the counter-cultural era of tech. Distrust of authority. Freedom of expression. Queer. Weird. Against the War on Drugs, neoliberalism, police, all that.
Demos were huge. Scrolls were also huge. Mods were huge. Good times. When I think of back then I still hold out hope for today.