Having fun? In this economy? Yes please.
Another post to ramble about how cool it is to be a programmer. You have been warned.
I’m not going to sugarcoat things: Everything seems pretty gloomy right now, at least from my perspective. Where do we even start? We have AI-taking-our-job fear mongers, and if you are American then the LA riot is looking pretty awful. And don’t even get me started on climate change, wars going on, and the depressive future for young people. It’s like we try to smile once and the whole world decides smiling deserve a slap in the wrist and we should not have any positivity at all.
But hear me out on this, just once. A dead simple idea which might sound bold during this turmoil of a time: Just have fun. Try to light up yourself.
As a software developer, I write C# professionally, and I work with .NET a lot. But whenever I want to build something cool, C# and .NET are the last language and framework I think of, respectively. I’m not saying that writing enterprise software with C# and .NET is boring, nor the language and framework themselves are boring, but using professional tools for hobby-ish projects just make the projects…sound professional. Why not give other fun things a try? And why building YACA (Yes Another CRUD App—Came up with this on my own) when there are, you know, less CRUD-ish kinds of things out there?
Here is what I have been hacking on: A toy programming language inspired by the book Writing an interpreter in Go by Thorsten Ball, a Redis clone in Go following this tutorial, and lately an AI coding agent because I was blown away by how Amp revamped my personal website after just a few prompts. I’m not trying to show off at all since all of them are incomplete and full of things I wish I were more knowledgable to resolve. And I know I’m bouncing between ideas for a compiler, a database and an agent. I swear, my mind gets overwhelmed with what to do, what should be done and what not, and I feel more restless than ever. And I thank you in advance for advice like focusing on one project at a time, or spend more time or resting, and a gazillion well intents, but really, I’m fine with juggling between projects.
What keeps me fine is that the fun will never end. One day I would complete all the features for my agent, build in everything possible for my compiler, probably make an even better Redis (Hah, we’ll see about that), and at that point I would have plenty of other things to do. A DNS server from scratch? Hell I would love that. Writing my own database? PostgreSQL in Golang here I come. Or maybe another version control system?. Whatever the next milestone is, one static thing is that I love writing code: Typing out code blocks helps me learn, seeing the application sending and receiving data makes me feel empowered, and refining my skills day by day warms me. Even when I have to write code for a living and not for learning, I still enjoy it a lot. There is always something to see, to experiment, to dabble in, to learn from the ground up. Cmon, you have to admit how cool that is. The fun must flow, and it will.
The important things are I’m having a lot of fun, I will have a lot of fun, and you should too. Try to have as much fun as you can. There might be times I will get so busy that I think the only fun thing I can do out of work is updating the README, but I think that would be enough. At that point I would have a family on my own, and spending time with them would be way of a better thing to do. Let the future decides.
I understand that for some people, having fun is hard. It’s a luxury, even. Some might come home from work all day and spend all their evening time with their partners and kids and all the family stuff, and the next thing they know that it’s bed time, getting ready for a new day. I have yet to start a family on my own, so I can’t have a voice in this, but for those out there trying to balance their time-for-everything-else and time for self-development: I get you. What you are doing is good enough, and if you can just squeeze in just a tiny amount of time each day for hacking stuff (not just software development), it would be wonderful. Even a tiny amount of hacking could lead to a tremendous amount of fun, you have my words.
Happy hacking.
Pro tip: DM the guys on “Just for Fun. No, Really” and see it for yourself.