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Confession: I haven’t touched code outside of work in weeks. I’ve spent most of my free time recharging. Snuggling cats, hanging out with friends, being a slug on the couch and binge watching tv. All of these things lately have been much more exciting to me than poking at code that isn’t work related. I’m not the only one who feels this way. But I also know that I’m in the minority of people who don’t have a lot of extenuating circumstances surrounding their free time. I don’t have a family to take care of (unless you count my cats and my friends – which I do).
It seems to be that we as engineers are expected to code all the time. I myself used to want to “live and breathe code”, but that takes an awful lot of brain power and I’m not sure the type of person it makes me. You see, I am firmly in agreement that coding feels like a foreign language (side note: I don’t agree with the arguments that coding should count as a foreign language requirement, they definitely fill different niches in that regard). And spending your whole working life translating a foreign language is exhausting. Don’t get me wrong sometimes it’s AWESOME that I can think of something that would be useful for me to have and then I can go build it, but after I’ve spent at least 8 hours in at least one foreign language I just want to go home and let my brain thing in English for a while.
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What’s especially hard (for me at least) is that I feel like I’m slacking if I just use technologies and frameworks I already know about in personal projects. If I’m going to be working on a personal project I should be learning something, right? So I get super sidetracked and slowed down learning all sorts of new things and then by the time I get back to the task at hand I’m exhausted and want no part of it.
I think probably the best way for me to handle this is to try to get back into it with just fun projects, projects that I don’t have to research, the just have to get built. But I also have to allow myself the possibility that personal projects might just not be for me. I can get my coding kicks outside of work by mentoring, attending conferences and even just reading about code.
