Ask HN: Do you miss being excited about programming/tech?

Related question: When was the last time you got excited about technology?

I remember the first time I installed GNU/Linux in my first desktop PC. I was so worry about it because I did not want to broke anything. I even bought more RAM because my machine only had 128 Mb. It was not enough for Ubuntu. After installing it, everything was new for me. Directories are now called places, anything is a file, multiple desktops, compiz, etc. I was very impressed at that time.

Now, we have reached a point where it is difficult to be impressed not because technology is not impressive itself but because we are so used to it.

Yes, feeling similar. I was dreaming of so many things, but with time I learn how much harder they are to implement than they seem. Computers can do so many things potentially, yet they are so much harder to actually achieve for various technical and political reasons. I wish I had infinite amount of free time to pursue all them.

New gadgets barely make me excited as they used to -- if anything I usually anticipate how I'll have to spend time finding my ways around vendor locks and making them interoperable. Perhaps the only thing that still excites me these days is reading Pinephone news -- really hope it takes off and liberates mobile computing.

I still get the excitement from time to time. Don't quite understand the whats hows or whys though. I still work on projects I think are cool, but they continuously seem to stray away from programming while still being anchored in tech. It comes are goes these days. Going back I'd never have gone into this as a career. I'm not particularly good at anything anyway, and it would be nice not to have any pressure, even form myself.

I get that feeling. Just getting old I guess.

I found the feeling sort of when I started playing with 3D printing, that led me down a rabbit hole filled with SBCS like Arduino and RPI, plus milling machines and laser cutters. It wasn't quite as exciting as the 1st time I connected my TI to a local BBS, but it was close the 1st time my RepRap started laying down filament.

I have not gotten that feeling back in years, but I do not see that as a problem. I get excited by seeing my children growing up, by exploring the world, seeing new things in nature.

If nothing gives you an excited feeling, that is a problem. But if tech is now just a job to you, and you get excitement in other areas of life, there is nothing wrong with that.

I still get that excitement from new technologies, sometomes even from discovering cool libs for my use cases. For me its just not weeks of researching anymore, making the whole excitement less memorable i guess

I get excited about new things, but they almost always turn out to be disappointing. So I spend most of my time trudging along getting stuff done and wishing my tools didn't get in my way quite so often.

I remember how excited I was when I wrote a few lines of assembly that made an LED blink on a pic14f84, I was super excited the first time I installed Gentoo and worked through the LFS book. At the top might be the first time I used KDE and got X11 working! Oh, and vimtutor!

Nowadays, I've noticed that the moments things get mixed up with money (i.e. programming professionally) the excitement is replaced for at best pragmatism and at worst drudgery.

Thus for me I find excitement in things that I can't possibly think how they can be cash from, like learning Esperanto or Racket, photography, cooking, HAM radio...

It's kind of like when you pay your best friends to help you move and the best friend dynamic changes because you are now his "boss"...

I don't actually remember for sure how excited I was when I was a kid working on my programming projects.

I definitely still get excited about trying new things. It might not be the same level of excitement as it was 30+ years ago but I don't remember.

For me it depends on what it is. Machine learning and AI is probably the most exciting thing. Honestly the small learning assignments and exercises are not as exciting as visualizing the final result of an advanced robot (which I may actually never get to).

But as far as motivation, having an exciting goal helps.

Also I think the novelty matters a bit. Something totally new that I haven't used before.

But I think mental and physical health and other circumstances affect levels of anticipation and such. At least for me. So make sure you are not depressed.

Also I would say age might effect it to some degree.

But I remember when I was a kid the experiments were very direct and pragmatic. There was very little reading or video lectures involved with typing in a "draw lines" program on my Coco 2 from the book and then changing the line color or whatever. And the amount of material I generally covered in a day was pretty small in content but high in novelty. So those things probably affect the level of fun.

I miss things being normal. I still get excited about tech sometimes but the startup, making money aspect has really run into the reality wall. Programming is just a way to earn a check these days...

Aren't you excited by the new Macs ?

I've never lost my excitement, but the majority of programming/tech are off creating worthless nonsense I do not care diddly squat about. When the community was learning AWS, I was created my own data centers for exponential savings; when the community went docker, I learned how to create my own VM and chose to discard the technology for bare metal programming. When the community embraced data science, I'd already had 7 semesters of graduate statistics and was happy as a clam. When ML came into vogue, I accessed working on ML models was above me, so I jointed a team lead by a ML pioneer that needed a super competent support scientist. Don't follow the herd, they're swayed by corporate marketing far too easily. Use critical analysis to earn your own trust, and then follow your analysis.

Go low level. Get back to basics - abandon higher level abstractions (thinking bloated and depressing frameworks). Implement a project that interests you, purely for fun.

>Don't know if I can ever get that feeling back. Have you managed to?

Problem solving for me is what is still very exciting. I love fixing things or enabling people to do things they couldn't do before or perhaps better than before.

I'm learning Kotlin so I can write a timesheet program for my wife so she doesn't have to do them by hand. Although I dabbled in golang for years I didn't learn it in earnest until I needed to extend a vendor's app written in the same language.

Similarly I breezed through the MIT Python course as a refresher after I actually had a reason to use the language in anger. Learning new things is fun, don't get me wrong. But I've really found a purpose when I find a way to apply it.

Yes, I had this exact feeling & here is my story.

I would go to work every day I feel unexcited about anything and everything. I would sit in meetings and be unengaging, I would be feel unmotivated to complete the work I was doing. New features, bug fixing, planning, cloud migration, interviews you name it and I was just feeling dead inside - and let's be clear this work was cutting edge stuff. The 'buzz' had just packed up it's bags gone.

So I quit work, out the rip I handed my notice in and left. I didn't work for 3 months; I sat and played games, went on walks, looked after peoples dogs, painted the house, read and after about a month I started working on my own projects again.

All of a sudden I found that 'spark' which used to get me up in the morning. Like when I first started programming. So I started working on my projects all day & every day - they're now on hold and I found myself a new company to work for and have never felt more engaged, excited and happy than ever before

Seriously, you may just need some leave everything behind and take some serious time off - sorted me right out

Sort of.

I can't speak to this being a thing that's always possible in professional environments, but the trick was to aim for reduced volume in everything I do. Much less code - and therefore less of a "product" - but much more intense design/conceptualization. Flexing that crystallized intelligence. I am more attuned to deep dives that aren't just muscle memory acts now. If it does reduce to muscle memory I get suspicious about it being automatable.

This means I don't spend the same kind of time within the feedback loop of the tools like I used to. I am not building big systems, but neither am I fighting them as much.

You were younger. Every door you opened was a seemingly infinite road in to a wondrous future. Everything existed only in the realm of possibility and promise for you back then.

Now more of your life has passed and a larger proportion of who and what you are is already behind you, fixed and unchangeable. So now your view of the future is that it short, too short, and only getting shorter. Now every door that opens is a potential waste of time and energy, which are now finite and precious resources.

The cost-benefit equation changes over the span of your life. The relative value of things changes. Back then, you would spend any amount of time, just to pass the time on something, anything vaguely interesting really. But now, you would spend any resource just to have more time in which to idly do things. But how can you just idly do things? Soon you will be dust, and the things you have done are who you will have been. You can ignore that as an immortal teenager, but as each decade passes, the spectre of your own mortality looms larger.

Anyway, you probably wanted more concrete answers. But for me, I try to just tap in to that cosy nostalgic feeling where I don't feel like I have to achieve anything, and just find something I can lose myself in to, with no purpose but to pass the time as if time were an infinite resource, there to be wasted. I think, perhaps, you may be getting a glimmer of that feeling from the audiobook, but your sadness about how far away that time is, is taking you out of the moment? Or maybe you just have something else going on in your life, like a soul-crushing job or something like that, and that needs to be dealt with first... Some time and space for reflection might be called for.

My story is somewhat different ... it took me more than 25 years to get passionate about programming.

I started the first experiments with BASIC around the age of 12, took programming lessons, but never really knew what to do with it. After I finished my B.Sc. in CS, I hated it with a passion for a while.

I only started getting passionate about it when I discovered computer music and that I can make my own music software, around the age of 30 or so.

I recently sat down at an old computer (2006 iMac) that I had given to the kids for watching DVDs.

I realised it still had Xcode installed. So I opened it and started a new project. And I really enjoyed it!

Something about coding on this oldish Mac makes me happy. I'm not sure why. In theory it's worse in pretty much every way. Many websites have stopped working on the no longer supported copy of Firefox.

Maybe it's because the old machine reminds me of the time when programming was still new to me. Some of my earliest attempts at GUI apps are still on that Mac. Now I see the same tools, but know so much more things I can do with them.

I'm not sure what my point is. I kinda lost interest in new tech as well, but somehow playing with an old computer made me excited about programming again.

This is what I think, but it is not too reflective. It's just that usually, stuff at work can get boring. It's just something you might not get away from, but it is what it is.

However, stuff that I can't do without effort, that is just absolutely fascinating and feels like above my pay-scale keeps me going. Also, finding old but still extremely useful tech (specifically older laptops that I want to use, particularly ThinkPads) are more exciting to find, obtain and repair than any newer laptops/gadgets.

In many ways, this attitude has never changed for me. In one way, it's more meaningful that I can do something for myself with something than something that is just some appliance. I mean, like a smartphone is just a requirement now, whether I care for it or not. (I'd probably want to invest and spend time researching a high quality washing machine, etc. than worry about a smartphone - if the washing machine doesn't have some IoT thing in it, I at least know it only serves me :) )

I found this to be true for me. I used to be so involved in TC39, framework wars, build systems, I was super-passionate and excited about the work; I loved the inner workings of things and loved making the products and tools I and my team use as awesome as possible.

That lasted for nearly 15 years. In the last two years or so, though, I've realized that management at the utterly enormous corporation I work for simply abused that passion. Things that were "works of programming art" or miraculous deliveries of impossible things became not just expected but demanded. That passion was simply burned out of me. Even when I see something I built in a keynote in front of thousands of people or on a website that gets literally millions of unique views every day, my feeling is, "meh."

The upside is that I've discovered other things in work and life: physical fitness, better work-life balance, and a learned defensive approach to scoping to protect the health and well-being of my team have started to define me more as a person instead of an on-demand voodoo-doctor/wizard/miracle worker. It comes as a detriment to my employer though... I refuse to pull all-nighters every week and my velocity has definitely dropped.

I have a feeling I'm not alone in this experience here. I'm assuming this very shift in perspective is why companies are less willing to hire us greybeards as opposed to fresh-faced amped-up kiddos despite our experience... we just know better.

I'm in my 50s and in my teens was taken over by that feeling of wanting to know more, and the excitement when I finally got access to use a computer was intense.

I have never lost that feeling and every morning I go into Emacs and look at the code TODO before doing anything else, even having a cup of coffee. And it's so great that today I can do this without even getting out of bed!

I strongly recommend doing the Advent of Code. https://adventofcode.com/

There are problem sets back to 2015. You get a problem, and once on solve it, you get the second half, which modifies the requirements to get the second answer.

I've been using Lazarus/Free Pascal, and it's really been testing my limits. Here's my github dump of things https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal

I just heard about it at the start of December, it's been a blast!

The possibilities are endless, just don't get hung up on the cloud and a web based interface for everything... it's a distraction at best, and a trap at worse.