Ask HN: How do I get back into software development after two years of break? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I get back into software development after two years of break?

2 pointslevel0coder6 comments

Two years ago, after going a big change in my life, I went through of long spell of depression and burnout.

Now I have been slowly recovering and now looking forward to get back into tech and software again. Is there any good healthy routines that I can follow to slowly get back into the groove of write code? I have been mostly writing python and golang code before and then moved into a more SRE /DevOps role.

Here is what I’m thinking so far:

1. Start building my own home lab. This helps me revisit the concepts of distributed computing and networking and learning to deploy containers with focus on observability.

2. Start working on some side projects like building a static website.

3. Read some books on Linux and play around with some distros. Maybe go through the LFS[1] book through and through.

4. Watch some really good tech talks and relearn some fundamental concepts in software? DNS? Threads? Async?

Any suggestions?

> 1. Start building my own home lab.

You mean your own company, or working as a freelancer? Both have high potential for burnout, and if you don't have very good connections to get contracts also depression is not far away.

Why not just continue to work in the field you worked before? Two years are no issue, and aparently you had good reasons for the break, so the HR people will understand.

Sorry if I didn’t make it clear before. With home lab I meant building a home server for hobby self hosted projects and learning some concepts around it. K3S, containerization etc.

Edit: my motivation isn’t to get a job but rather get into a routine of tech related work.

Well, then choose one or more open source projects which interest you and start to contribute (start with reviews or documentation if you don't directly want to start coding).

I'd focus on item 2, with a nod toward static site generation (at one end) and WebAssembly at the other.

maybe use Python to connect to ChatGPT api.

Here's simple app I built to connect: https://github.com/gnuconcepts/ChatWindowLLM

You could look at connecting to Supabase.

Yes that’s a great recommendation. I am exploring the API without any specific goals and trying to understand concepts like conversation, streaming etc. I have also applied for gpt-4 model access but so far haven’t heard from them.

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