… but I wish I were.
Well ok, actually I am a programmer, in that I am employed to (among other things) write programs. But it’s not in the professional sense that I wish to be a programmer, it’s in the amateur sense. That is, the original meaning of “amateur”, one who does something for love, not money. (However I certainly am an “amateur” programmer in the more common sense, “novice” rather than “expert”–sometimes words can be so difficult.) I say this because although I love programming in the abstract, I just don’t do a lot of it! Ergo the conspicuous absence of posts about my programming projects, which is what this blog was ostensibly for.
I just haven’t been greatly motivated to do anything for quite some time, and I’ve been struggling to figure out why that is. I’ve identified a couple reasons:
Programming at work makes me disinclined to do programming at home. This is a feeling that a number of my programmer friends have reported also. For some it goes even further–they don’t even want to be on the computer at home. I don’t seem to have that problem; I’ve no difficulty spending much (and probably too much) of my time at home playing games, browsing the web, whatever. But focusing on projects, even when they are fun stuff compared to the boring stuff at work, is often difficult.
Programming alone is dull. When I was younger I learned programming by myself, and most of my early experiments and projects were done solo. It wasn’t a problem then, though I would have liked working with other programmers. I just hadn’t had many friends who were interested in it. But I find now that my disposition has changed, and I more strongly crave the interaction with others. I had the opportunity for it in college, and now prefer it. This is a major thing lacking from my job actually, the fact that I am not on a team of programmers.
Fortunately these factors don’t always prevail; sometimes I can manage to overcome them and get stuff done. Sometimes I can even reach the mood described by Nikola Tesla:
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
All summer I did no programming at all, but when September came and I realized I had a lot of work on AMazeBot yet to be done, I managed to slowly get back into it. I’m not yet in the Tesla state, but I’m gaining some momentum.
Now if I can only find the motivation to write blog posts more frequently…
