This is a first for me. I’ve got some personal projects I want to work on, and I really enjoy programming. Normally first thing in the morning I’ll spend an hour waking up, drinking coffee, and writing some code.
I’m a professional software developer, and software development is a passion and hobby. But I felt like I needed a bit of a reset so I’ve made an effort to not write any code at all during the Christmas/New Years holidays (about 3 weeks).
Honestly I don’t feel like I’ve missed out, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting back into it and I think I’ll benefit from it. Ill be back at it again next week.
I know 3 weeks isn’t a huge amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Have you found yourself taking a complete break from coding? How did you find things when you had to start up again? Felt like it benefitted you or ended up losing the trail a bit?
Can’t speak for your situation, but I honestly think it’s because of burnout. No one I know in the coding industry is doing well right now… everyone is burnt out as fuck, stessed and overworked as hell.
It was so bad for me that it worsened my disabilities in October and I’ve not gotten back to work since. Though tbf, I have been working in my FOSS project. Making that a part of my portfolio so I can move on to employment rather than bargain basement freelancing that’s killing me.
Have children. You will have no spare time to code for several years after that 😆 Mine are 4 and 5 years old now and I never have time or energy to code outside work.
But I think that’s a good thing. I leave coding at work, mostly use my computer for gaming.
I took up woodworking instead!
For me it feels like the longer I work as a developer the less code I write. My days are usually spend more in research, creating plans, reviewing PRs, etc.
I do also miss coding and like to experiment with new features and languages so I just code on the side with things like advent of code or leetcode.
I think this year will be a lot less code at work, and more documentation etc for sure. So that might actually help keep me motivated with my own projects to keep on that coding mindset.
I only wrote code for [email protected] which is so different to my usual tasks that it feels like a break.
Not a bad idea really. Though if there is a problem I can’t solve within the hour, I tend to dwell on it and work through it in my head until I can get back to it. Thought just going cold turkey (so to speak) for the holidays might be better this time around.
I stopped at Thanksgiving. As an indie dev, I am running into all the boring parts of finishing a game and each of the remaining tasks is painful, non-programming related (like art, UX, and publishing and marketing), and im working out of my own pocket (in my free time).
I want to be done with this project, but other facets of my life got bigger during the holidays. Im socializing more online, rediscovered old games, and found more satisfying things to do with my free time.
I miss just coding.
As they say, the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time. Thats where all the boring stuff lives or the stuff that you’ve put off over and over again.
Get through it and you’ll be able to get back to the stuff you enjoy again.
I personally did 1 godot tutorial and that’s all I’ve learned this break
It slowly started happening in the last few years. And then I got a burn-out. I haven’t really written code in months now. I don’t think it’d really stress me out, but honestly I just don’t really feel like it most of the time. I try to spend most of my time away from a screen
I’m so tired of coding for work, even though I always liked the thrill of just exploring where a project would take me. I’ve been neglecting my personal projects and, over time, stopped feeling bad about it. I have plenty of opportunities at work to learn about new things, it’s okay if I do something unrelated in my free time.
LLMs gave me some relief with work and I’m now able to at least think about programming other things for fun, but haven’t done any actual project yet.
I might try walking away from the screen for the whole weekends as my new year resolution (for different reasons). My eyesight is starting to fail and I think a 2 day break from the screen every week could help.
I’ve been pretty depressed after my burnout few years ago and have been unable to enjoy programming ever since. It’s my profession though so I still do it, but outside of the professional stuff I’ve only had a 1 month this year where I could enjoy sitting on a computer at home and to do some actual coding. Outside of coding there’s a lot of pondering, designing, and analysing related to development that I still do and enjoy, but it’s exhausting after working.
I always feel like I lose the trail. I barely ever even take lunch. I recently moved to a tech lead role and I barely have time to look at actual code. I still feel like taking time off is hard because I have to keep constant track of everything or I will completely lose the thread of everything that’s going on.
I did get Friday off to drive back home from a working vacation. It felt great. The vacation was stressful as hell because I had family stuff and work stuff intermingled. I literally was in my car fixing an issue with a deployment one minute, boarding an airboat to look at alligators the next, and an hour later I’m in a forgettable meeting in the back seat of the car as someone else drives home.
It wasn’t ideal but the vacation was booked before I had to change jobs and I went from being forced to take that week off to having to cover for 80% of my team. I’m definitely getting too old for this shit, but I enjoy it.
Making the new guy take the Christmas shift is a dick move on the part of the team/company.
but christmas shift is imho pretty great for new team members (unless it collides with vacation plans, because the job switch was rather sudden and no one else is there), atleast here it tends to slow going, not many meetings and we get to do stuff that accumulated over the year that we wanted to do, but couldn’t for various reasons, so there are enough tasks for which you’ll see a lot of the code base and colleagues actually have time for pair programming and such.
and christmas itself is 2 and a half holidays in germany, so that helps too.
You have a point, but in my experience most of your colleagues are out so if you have questions it is harder to find someone who can help.
yep, a team with “enough” workers when everybody is there and not sick is understaffed, working in those teams can become a nightmare the whole year round.
and for questions the colleague does not know the answere to? we are atleast two people with a functioning brain, we can figure stuff out. Most of the time if a new dev asks me something and i have time, i’ll comb through docs with them or we debug something together even if i am pretty sure what’s to do, because i don’t want to become a search engine for my colleagues, i want colleagues who can figure stuff out, so i’ll show them how I figure stuff out, and I learn stuff along the way pretty often doing that.
if I don’t have time I probably have some links that should lead to answeres and often enough a time window later in the day where we can talk, just because its christmas time and most of my meetings are cancelled :D
I agree, but I didn’t have the vacation days. I had just enough for the driving day and I think 5 or 6 days for an anniversary vacation in April.
What shocked me was there was hardly any discernible lightening of the schedule. I expected the week to be pretty light, but I wound up in 8+ hours worth of meetings and deployments every day except Christmas Day. I was given half of Christmas Eve off, but I’d already put in 8 hours by then anyway.
God damn sounds tough…
Same. I’ve been off a few weeks and I’ve been drinking cocktails and making mead. Been so nice not to see a screen. Well, one with code on it; I’ve watched a ton of shows.
Probably would have, but a few scripts of mine broke after distro hopping, so I had to fix those.
Then I found out about Pomodoro timers, so I wanted to test them out. So, I fixed up some scripts with it.
I haven’t started any new projects yet, though.
I’ve found myself in similar situations. However I haven’t taken full three weeks off; I think my longest has been about 10 days.
I’ve always relished getting back to it with a clear mind and often a well thought out plan and it feels like the features flow faster from the fingertips.
Never fight taking a bit of time off, it grants perspective and lets you decompress, don’t think that can ever be a bad thing (given there’s nothing you really need to be doing in that time to make sure you’ve got a steady income)
