If you want to become a better web developer, you have to love programming. If someone came to me today and told me that they will give me a billion rand to never write a line of code in my life again. I will turn them down. I admit there has been times that I have been sick of it. I know what it is like when you had a long week and a client’s website suddenly goes down on a Friday afternoon leaving you to work an extra 20 hours on a weekend.
Lately, I find myself doing work over weekends when I am bored. Or I will write code on some of my own projects. This is how much I love what I do.
If you are just starting out in the website development sector and you feel bad because your bad. It is a phase that every developer goes through. Nobody is born a developer. If you are a web developer and you do not love what you do, try and find something. I’ve already explained how much I love programming above and and it has not always been easy. You need to keep your passion alive. It will feed you energy in situations where you need them.
I have written a couple of hundred thousand lines of code in my life and my excitement over code is the same it was when I wrote my first lines. I hear horror stories of people who lose their love for programming. So try your best to keep your passion alive.
So just how do you keep your passion alive?
1. Be grateful for the knowledge you have.
I tell myself that I get to program. I am in a career where I get to turn my thoughts into reality. Programming is a field with no limitation where you can build worlds and change lives. No career is perfect, every single one has their own set of difficulties. If I compare programming with some careers out there I am glad I decided to become a programmer.
2. Find projects that you want to work on
You need to find a project that you want to work on. This can range from something in the source community, a charity or maybe your own custom project. What I am personally busy with is an MMORPG game. I am writing NPC plots, building worlds, monsters, databases and all sorts of work. I have been working on this for the last 2 years, put in more then 500 hours and have not been paid a cent. It is a passion project that I am doing for the love of code. If there is any rewards down the road, that will be cool, but that is not the purpose of the project. Sometimes developers forget that coding can be a chore or a hobby and even a full time developer can treat their code as a hobby.
3. Partake in development competitions
Something that has really pushed my love for code is a coding challenge. In South Africa we have a yearly competition called the Entelect challenge. In this challenge you get a game framework already built with a dead AI. Then you need to program a bot that will outplay another bot on a 1 vs 1 field. This competition was fun, it pushed me to learn and I made a few friends in the process.
Sometimes while programing you get tired, stressed and the code just do not want to flow. if you are in this position.
Question of the post: Have you ever lost your love for code and how did you get it back?
