I hope I don't need to wait until retirement to have enough energy to code for fun again. It's still quite far off.
I still do some coding for fun, but I can't spend more than a weekend on a project without feeling like my time and effort could go towards work instead, especially since I get to do my own projects at work too. But they're not exactly voxel engines or roguelikes.
I don't code for fun anymore. I haven't for a couple years. Honestly, it all just takes too much time. I enjoy writing code for work; but, at home, I work out, I play video games, I spend time with friends and go on hikes.
I think it's okay for you to not be interested in doing side projects anymore, there's a lot more to life and the world than programming; and, if your heart wants to venture outside of it, then let it! You might find another, wonderful passion :)
I feel exactly the same. I enjoy my work but by the time it gets to the evening I need a break, and I never manage to find the time to hack on fun side projects. I have so many silly ideas and things I want to hack on; I really want to get back into programming just for the hell of it.
I think if you're burned out and try to force fun, it won't happen. The fun comes from following inspiration. Like recognizing a pattern in life and thinking 'I know how that works' and playing with some code as a reaction to that inspiration. Not because you think you should or associate yourself with being a programmer or whatever else, but because it just seems like the most natural way to carry on approaching the thing that sparked your interest.
I was spending anything from 12 to 16h per day (including weekends) for about 10 months working on my game engine after i quit my day job. Now that I'm working again i still try to throw at least 2-3h at it after work. Mostly i enjoy bit but sometimes there are moments when it begins to feel like a grind too. But unfortunately there's no choice but to grind through those boring tedious parts just go get it done. The key i find is to find the balance between doing the "fun stuff" abd the boilerplate "just has to be done" parts.
Pick a project to work on in your free time. A game, an audio synthesizer, a web application, maybe a character or world generator for a tabletop game you enjoy.
Work on it for however small a timeslice you want, while still working on it. Half an hour every weekend, I don't know. Who cares. Just spend that little bit of time solving a problem you care about and see if your enjoyment of programming improves.
I like to write games. From scratch. Well, I use libraries or platforms to do things like load bitmaps and draw to the display, but I don't use Unity, Unreal, or one of those. It's relaxing. I can do things like REFACTOR THE WHOLE DAMN CODEBASE if I want to without stepping on any toes. There's no JIRA, no standups, no coworkers looking at me funny because I use Emacs for all the things, no BAs or PMs telling me "that's out of scope for this sprint--no wait, it must be finished by sprint's end" two days before the sprint ends (actually happened once on the job). There's just me, my goals, and the code.
But that's my jam, yo. You need to find the problems you enjoy solving, then solve them your own way on your own time.
I you love coding you won't stop at your time off. When your motivation is off, your side-projects are not fun anymore. Maybe try a new technology stack which is more fun.
Seconded. I code outside of work now to keep myself sharp. It needs to be fun though, so I end up delving into things like 8-bit assembly, writing games, fiddling with MIDI or whatever.
Play more, ignore your official goals, do it just for the fun. There are many interesting things to pique your imagination. I bet that's what you were doing when you loved to code.
Learn a new programming language or framework. Create a hobby project on it. It may bring back the fun of coding rather than coding because its your job.
I'm one of these people that doesn't have much time less the energy to focus on side projects when I'm home from work, that said my career has been changing over the last few years and at times I rarely have any code to write at work.
These are the times when I really find a yearning to write something and I want to put a bit of time into a side project like learning Godot, or writing a desktop GUI based program with Rust.
I just need to be doing something different with my day job to have the inspiration and energy to code when I get home, unfortunately at the moment I'm coding at work again, and when I get home I will stare blankly at the screen infront of me if I try and write more code, even in a different language.
I've been past this point for about a year now, living on the profits of my business stuff, all of which is ticking away well enough that I can get away with a 10 minute or less "work day" most days.
As others here have predicted, I spend a lot of time outdoors (having moved to France specifically for the rock climbing) and building tree forts in the back garden for the kids. Pretty much any day can be a day off, so if the sun is shining you probably won't find me at the computer.
I also find I still work quite a bit (which translates to a few days a week for me). Partly because I realize that products come and go, and that these ones will eventually plateau then fade away, so I'd better have another one in the pipeline to replace them when that happens.
But partly because it's fun. This has been my hobby since I was a kid, and it's only an accident that somebody decided that we should start paying computer programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the 90s. Had that not happened, I'd be an Engineer who programmed in his spare time. I used to spend most of each year traveling, and I'd find that the thing that brought me back to the "world" was never money, but the need to use my brain again.
I bet that even if this next thing [1] takes off and leaves me idle again, I'll probably find another fun project to work on.
This is already what I do in my free time. Projects.
When I retire (which I hope is soon, so I can get away from my crushing, but well-compensated schedule), I imagine I will have no problem at all filling my time with projects and a huge backlog of games and books for when I don't feel like doing projects.
I'm desperate to "retire" by making enough of a nest egg to live off the returns. Some things I'd love to do if I had the time:
* Improve my culinary skills. Some recipes require all day to do "right", and I need to take short-cuts in order to use the 30 minutes - 1 hour I have per day.
* Recreational programming. Few people who are good at numeric programming also have the free time to just "play". Procedural generation, using the latest/greatest visual processing algorithms, automatically integrating real-time data feeds into a "game" of sorts. I hate that I'm using my creativity to generate excel reports that mostly get consumed by programs.
* Music theory. I'd love to know more here.
* Home improvement / homesteading. It would be great to have to time to make my living space better fit for my preferences.
* Volunteering and advocacy. There are a lot of low paying problems in the world that need good motivated minds working on them.
* Art projects. I loved art in college, but never had the time to pursue it in my professional life.
* Personal Health. I love to run and open water swim. Both of these require me to have good weather and be in the right physical state to make use of that weather. Having more free time maximizes my chance to exercise under optimal conditions.
I think it helps that most of these things are things I can do alone and do not necessarily require coordination with other people. The author seems to stress how lonely it is to not have enforced scheduled social time.
This is me with writing code. I do it professionally and have for almost 15 years. I'm so burnt out on the day to day, forced work. But show me something interesting or hackable, a game I like that I can mod, a cool script, a cool concept that might make a neat image or sound. Whatever it might be, suddenly I'm playing again and having fun, burnout or not.
Just wish I could find a way to make that my paycheck...
I feel very similar so probably don't have great advice, but as someone else mentioned it depends on your particular scenario. For me I have a day job at a company then my own company on the side I do a few hours of work a week for too. After dealing with all that work (much of it involves programming or related efforts), I have nearly zero energy to think about programming outside of that.
I used to have various side projects and programming passions but as soon as I think about them now my mind just numbs out. All the creative programming energy is going into other things.
So I kinda gave up on trying to hobby program or think of it as something I like to do but as work, and when not working try to do anything that is not involved with it basically. I still wonder if sometimes I could find another small business or job that wouldn't involve programming so I could do it as a hobby again but the money is too good to pass up so not sure what I'll end up doing. I feel like if I could retire I'd soon go back to hobby projects and enjoy it more again. Who knows.
One idea is to try to focus the things you once thought were fun. If you are a developer try some recreational coding. Just build something fun.
This is a bit of a plug but checkout Jamis Buck. I interviewed him about burn out and I learned a lot. It can be a slow process to rekindle things after burn out so give yourself time.
I have been coding every day for several years until I've burnt out, now I'm slowly relearning how to enjoy life. It doesn't work for everyone; my mistake was to start treating unpaid hobby like serious work.
Working with code day to day has almost fostered in me a sense of contempt for computers. In high school/college, I spent a lot of free time doing rom hacks, etc. I just can't now. Now my tech hobbies lay more around arcade repair/modding. Knowing what I know now, I wish I could muster up the energy to combine the two and work on projects similar to UMK3+ [0], but I just don't feel like sitting in front of a debugger all evening after coding all day at work :|
I guess in my case, I had to find a hobby that was not exactly like work, even if it was work-adjacent.
I basically lost my hobby (writing desktop applications) by turning it into a profession.
I successfully compensated that with game dev. I started writing little games, working on game engines, and tinkering around. I'm pretty happy with that now. I guess that happens to a lot of people when turning your hobby into sth. you do for your living.
And I also realized that humans are simply not made to sit 12+ hours a day. (Count the work time + spare time). So some kind of activity is recommended, I guess.
//Edit: However, it took my quite some years to figure out why I hadn't fun coding Desktop applications in my spare time any longer...
I still do some coding for fun, but I can't spend more than a weekend on a project without feeling like my time and effort could go towards work instead, especially since I get to do my own projects at work too. But they're not exactly voxel engines or roguelikes.
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