I have a family friend who has been dabbling with development for a few years now and is considering starting to pursue it as a career after quite some time in the hospitality business. The conversation turned interesting when we started discussing the inspiration for some of the personal projects that we had worked on. What we came to...
You're working on a personal project you are excited about, and you enjoy working on it, but you don't feel like working on it. Outside of a work environment there are no external forces to push you forwards, so what do you find are the most successful ways to sustain your motivation though a several-week project? ...
Some programmers enjoy optimizing code to make the implementation as fast as humanly possible; or golfing to make code as compact as possible. Others enjoy metaprogramming to make code generic, or designing algorithms to be asymptotically efficient. What do you find most interesting and challenging as a programmer? ...
I recently find my self stuck in state where I feel not very into code, I need some kind of inspiration, so sometimes I just review somebody's code, watch some kind of movie about coding or something like that, but not always I get what I need, if you know what I mean. How do you increase your mood for coding ? ...
Does anybody else feel like they need to change jobs every year or two to stay sane and happy or am I just in the wrong profession entirely? I think I am burned out both on my current job and burned out on programming in general. Let me explain. I have been a software engineer for going on 8 years and I am now nearly two years into my...
If you come across - Linus presentation about git - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8, he not only presented git well. He also commands everything (respect, technology, competitors) even as a developer. Whenever I feel low, I watch that video. It really motivates me, though it was not his intention. I learn lot of lesson, give ...
I am currently a grad student, but I was in the industry for a few years before going back to school. I am in a class which involves teams of 4 working on fairly ambitious projects. As a result of having been in the industry, I have a lot of "software engineering" experience my fellow teammates lack (they are using SVN for the first t...
I was surfing the web and found myself at 3D Realms hiring page. It sounds quite nice what they are advertising there. Everywhere you can read things like "Freedom from arbitrary completion date pressures". This sounded very sensible to me since I sometimes have problems with schedules myself. But when I connected the statement with t...
Certain days (like today) make me wonder for how long can I really keep up with having to constantly learn new stuff to be able to survive in this industry. And by survive I do not simply mean “make a living”. For example as a .NET programmer I have .. WCF / Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC / Ruby / Python / Sharepoint (yuck) / New ORM / New U...
Do you cultivate an alternative career/hobby which complements or refreshes your primary role as a developer? If so, what is it and why? Also see these related questions: If you weren't a programmer what would you be doing How do you vent stress as a programmer? What are some exercises you do to make you a better programmer? How do yo...
I go through phases where I spend far too much time stressing out over the best way to program something instead of just programming the damn thing - a trait I don't think is uncommon among programmers. So, does anyone have techniques for psyching oneself out so one can relax and let oneself code something which, while not 100% perfect c...
For me its accomplishing something by the end of the day. I've been in IT for a few years now and I've noticed that the thing that keeps my morale up is being able to say "I accomplished something" at the end of each day. I've found that accomplishing something is more important that my rate of pay or the tools and technology I use. If...
I work with a bunch of people that write sloppy code. I mean things like defining variables in multiple places, tightly coupling code, etc. I am not an expert but I have a willingness to improve. It seems the people I work with are completely fine with what they are doing. How can I motivate them to improve? I can't offer any incentives ...
As software developers we all know that motivation matters. Without it we could just stare into the monitor all day long and do nothing. There are some tricks to get yourself motivated like talking to people or doing the fun part of the project, but they do not always work. In the mean time I started to notice that I am most productive ...
First, let's me explain my situation. I am 25 years old. I have been a junior programmer for two years and this is my first job. I am an active person and I like the challenge and the satisfaction of solving problems. Although my responsibility is to develop software, I have done many things beyond my job description: increase team colla...
My current job has somewhat of a more structured methodology than I'm used to and I'm asked to write detailed task lists and estimations before working on a block of functionality. For some reason, I have an awfully hard time doing these and I spend a lot of energy fighting my resistance to these tasks instead of just doing them. It's ...
I'm a developer and have very much fun at nearly all stages of software developent, from gathering requirements, deciding on language, libraries and tools, sketching the architecture to implementing. Even bugfixing is fun. Unit testing is not. Writing a unit test is not that bad, I can get over it. But the quantity of work involved in t...
I believe that spare time programming projects are an important way to improve my skills as a developer, but lately I've been having troubles finding the motivation to work on them. I used to have at least 2-3 projects going on at all times, but then I got a job in the industry... Don't get me wrong - I love working as a programmer, and...
Have you ever worked on a development of a product which took a long time to release to public( at most 2 years)?.And, you were working on the same project for the whole time.How did you keep yourself motivated? And, I wonder should delivering a product take such a long time? There are others who have this philosophy- get the product out...
What is the main motivation behind why you contribute to an open source project? Possible reason I have identified: Freedom to express your ideas an environment where you can develop new ideas Relationships, Teamwork and sense of community Professional skills development, including for your resume Employed by an open source or...