Programming Ennui
Jun. 12th, 2003 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nockergeekI think I know one major reason why I have trouble maintaining focus at work:
I haven't had a job that's really inspired me lately. No new projects with timelines and new features and, most of all, new clients. It's just the same old jobs for the same old customers, merely variations on a tired theme. Another event registration system for customer A, another e-commerce add-on for customer B, and maintenance jobs out the wazoo. Nothing really new, though. Nothing that stretches my brain.
I'd love to do some programming on my own, work on my own projects, but I can't just sit and work on it because I get too many distractions from current clients, and since paying customers come first, I'm pretty much stuck. Heck, there's even jobs that I'd love to do on my own for some of these customers, just to automate some of the jobs that they have me do, or if nothing else, to give them the capability to do some of these menial tasks themselves.
Programming is one part science and one part art, and the art side is getting tired of producing the same old crap over and over. I need a challenge, one that requires me to study and learn and wrap my brain around new concepts. As is, I don't really improve much, because there's no incentive or time to focus on sharpening my skills. I'm not atrophying -- I stay relatively busy -- but I am getting dull and rusty.
I just need a job to light a fire under me, to flip that switch in my mind that gets my creative juices flowing. As is, while I don't dread working on anything web-related, it just doesn't drive me as much. I can barely even get up enough excitement to maintain the church website, let alone develop anything new with it. Of course, no one's told me what they'd want to change yet. I have a few ideas, but they require conferring with more people, and no one's shown a lick of interest. Maybe I need to light fires under other people.
But first, gotta tend to my own fire. Need to get inspired.
I haven't had a job that's really inspired me lately. No new projects with timelines and new features and, most of all, new clients. It's just the same old jobs for the same old customers, merely variations on a tired theme. Another event registration system for customer A, another e-commerce add-on for customer B, and maintenance jobs out the wazoo. Nothing really new, though. Nothing that stretches my brain.
I'd love to do some programming on my own, work on my own projects, but I can't just sit and work on it because I get too many distractions from current clients, and since paying customers come first, I'm pretty much stuck. Heck, there's even jobs that I'd love to do on my own for some of these customers, just to automate some of the jobs that they have me do, or if nothing else, to give them the capability to do some of these menial tasks themselves.
Programming is one part science and one part art, and the art side is getting tired of producing the same old crap over and over. I need a challenge, one that requires me to study and learn and wrap my brain around new concepts. As is, I don't really improve much, because there's no incentive or time to focus on sharpening my skills. I'm not atrophying -- I stay relatively busy -- but I am getting dull and rusty.
I just need a job to light a fire under me, to flip that switch in my mind that gets my creative juices flowing. As is, while I don't dread working on anything web-related, it just doesn't drive me as much. I can barely even get up enough excitement to maintain the church website, let alone develop anything new with it. Of course, no one's told me what they'd want to change yet. I have a few ideas, but they require conferring with more people, and no one's shown a lick of interest. Maybe I need to light fires under other people.
But first, gotta tend to my own fire. Need to get inspired.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2003-06-12 02:57 pm (UTC)In my spare time I'm working on a programming language. It tends to keep my brain in a searching state. :)
no subject
on 2003-06-12 03:10 pm (UTC)With more web-centric languages (Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc.), this is easy to find - there's a lot of material out there on "How to do X in language Y". With C++, though, everything seems much more academic; there's a lot of primers on low-level basics (how to load a library, how to play with pointers, etc.), but not many on how to take those building blocks and do something useful with them. Well, that's not entirely true - there are also guides that assume you both know the basics and have practical C++ programming experience (such as "Programming Games in C++" or the like). There's little to no middle ground.