Ask HN: How can I rediscover my passion about computers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I rediscover my passion about computers?

3 pointsendorphine4 comments

I remember when first trying to learn a programming language, it was both fascinating and magical. A new world of possibilities was opening before me.

The same when I learned about the internet.

Now, I'm looking at things like Asahi Linux or the people building operating systems and compilers, and I do find them fascinating, and I'm always thinking about starting to hack on something new so that I can create something and learn and create a bit of magic myself, but I never sit down to do it.

Is anyone else feeling like this? Like you _want_ to do something with the things you already know, you want to learn, you want to demystify how things work under the hood by building something for the fun of it, but never start?

Any ways to overcome this lack of motivation and drive?

I've since lost interest in learning technical minutia for the sake of learning minutia. Instead, everything I learn is in service to reaching an end goal that is important and meaningful to me.

Thus, motivation comes down to find something meaningful/purposeful to work on, and then wanting to do the best implementation possible for that thing, whatever it happens to be.

Just do it. I know it's not the answer you're looking for but I've struggled with the same thing and I keep coming back to that. Just get started, even if it is as small as just launching the software, sketching a draft or gathering the parts. Once you start, it is infinitely easier to keep going. And maybe set aside a specific time/day for doing, thats helped me a fair bit.

Find that “itch” that you really want to scratch.

Maybe building self-hosting language/compiler, or a toy linux-like kernel, or a physics engine, games then publish to itch.io, a small numpy-like library that can do autograd, whatever.

Once you start it really is hard to stop.

So instead of doing what you really want to do you are doing something else. What is this something else and why do you really want to do it so much that you are putting off doing what you really want.

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