I started my career as a programmer and did quite well at that. I never wanted to get into management but in due course of time, I was forced to. Now I am out of touch with programming for almost 4 years. I wanted to get into hardcore development again - like I want to build frameworks and such stuff. I am faced with enormous inertia and dont know where to start. I am basically a Java programmer. Any tips and suggestions how to go about this ?
Start by picking a language. Which one you choose will depend on why you want to be a programmer. My goal is to develop a web app for a startup so I looked at popular languages with popular frameworks. I chose Django/Python over Ruby on Rails.
Playing with a framework gave me some quick returns for minimal effort. So the rewards kept me going.
Quickly though you realize that you need language expertise. That's when I hit the books, sought assignments and problems (e.g. Project Euler).
One last tip, set some mini-projects with limited scope as goals - one after the other. Make sure their complexity increases. This will serve as a ramp up, but also the sense of completing a project becomes a sort of self-reward. The projects may also server as a portfolio.