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Top comments (53)
I could write essays on this topic.
For me, it is my WHY. Your WHY is your driving force, the reason why you can conquer any obstacle. Nietzsche said "For he who has a why to live, can bear almost any how!" For me, that why is my family.
I worked in GAS STATIONS FRYING CHICKEN! When I hit the age of 30 I realized I had to pivot or be stuck there forever. I looked at my wife and son, my WHY. I knew that I had to do something. Long story short, began to learn to code. I fell in love!
I helped 44 people land their first jobs in tech last year. I am a software engineer. I host meetups and bring resources to developers in my city. The journey has been AMAZING! Now I am focused on motivating and inspiring developers of all levels. To show others that the path exists!
Keep doing amazing things!
Almost the same here, my motivation is my kids, my wife, and now finally I am working in a big company as a software engineer.
Even when I get bored, I don't know what to do and I lost focus, I remember how hard was on the past to pay the bills, to buy food with a low salary and newborn baby.
That is one motivating story. May i ask how long have you been coding since you started at 30?
It has been 3 years since I started learning. Been working for almost a year. Mainly because I kept turning down jobs so I could help others land theirs. That is a story for another day lol.
Doing a great job, man! Keep up the good work 👍👍💪
You should definitely share your story more. I think lot of people will get motivation from you :)
I do on twitter. I am not really a writer, I am more of a speaker. But I am going to write a post about my journey to tech since MANY people keep asking me about it.
Looking forward to it😉...
I dont.
Motivation has proven to be too fleeting and unreliable in my case.
Discipline and inertia of habit is what I do/keep to keep 'motivated'.
For me, self-discipline is of more value than motivation. Motivation is a momentary thing, it comes and it goes. But being disciplined will help you achieve results more since you can train yourself to work on something regularly with a set routine.
For example, I may be motivated to go to the gym so that I can achieve a desired goal weight. That's nothing if you don't actually go to the gym say, three times a week, every week.
I have a couple of long-term goals for where I see myself in a couple of years. I then break that down into yearly goals, and then those yearly goals into monthly ones.
Having these goals helps keep me motivated to keep on making small improvements to myself each and every day 💪 I still do have days where I might not be feeling it and don't do anything to work towards my goals but I think overall it's been well worth it for me.
I have a 'lifetime' side project. It's ambitious and I can't stop thinking about it. No matter what happens, whether I pass or fail coding interviews, get rejected for lack of experience or no buzz words in my resume, whether I fear I'm too old or slow in thinking.... the beauty and power in the my 'lifetime' idea keeps me going.
I was having difficulty waking up. I now work on my side project first thing in the morning. Wake up pretty quickly now for if I don't wake up, then I don't get to work on my side project :)
if I have an interview which didn't go well, I'll work on my side project after for an hour.
Calling it a side project disrespects it in a way. I think it's my 'life-giving' project :)
It's a different thing I think, but noticing that I sort of just got demotivated and let good projects fall by the wayside helped me launch what eventually became DEV. I told myself I wouldn't stop working on it for ten years, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful it was. I just thought I gave up on other things too soon.
Anyway, it's been quite successful and I'm happy I gave myself that rule.
I agree about the
ten yearrule of thumb. It's a nice way to prioritize. I had the same problem too in a different manner. So many ideas that inspire me. I just had to choose and commit.It's successful indeed :). Thank you for sticking through. Dev.to is a force multiplier :)
Great, what is it about then?
Thanks Max, for your interest :).
I desire a library which will allow me to succinctly capture the business requirements in an executable manner. I'm tired of writing the same code again and again in 100 different ways and feeling this spiderweb of discomfort and boredom and not knowing how to improve my code, capture the common pieces. Some people call it 'accidental complexity'[2] vs 'essential complexity' i.e. business requirements.
What do executable business requirements look like? One approach is Datalog: a declarative(like SQL + recursion) logic language where you express business rules and let the engine figure out your solution. You can see an example here[1].
Datalog and it's derivative are already popular in the Clojure world(Datomic/Datahike/DataScript). It's used in production, so I'm not worried about it not working.
That's great but I want a language that can capture almost all "business" requirements: tax rules, distributed systems, analytics, machine learning algorithms.
For that, we need to explicitly capture time in our specifications :). Rajiv was hungry at time t, Rajiv ate strawberries at time t+1, Rajiv is not hungry at time t+2.
So, since you kindly asked, my project is Mercylog(github.com/RAbraham/mercylog), a Python library planning to unify three different projects which explicitly capture time.
Like I said, it's ambitious but if it wasn't, would I wake up early as I need all the time I can get ... if I get rejected in interviews for some coding puzzle, this thing is computer science heavy and I will do it :).
I'm an average guy but my projects don't need to be average ;)
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[1] - dev.to/rabraham/introduction-to-da...
[2] - curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMark...
It's not really the same code instead your using it in a different context, uses cases, constraints & organisation culture. As the saying goes "if you view the world as a hammer everything looks like a nail to you".
Which is why I think your approach might be shrew towards the computer science lens and might be neglecting different aspects of mental models associated in building software. My suggestion is looking at design systems as the basis for your project instead.
Thanks Max, will check it out :).
Mix things up. They say too much of a good thing is bad for you. I've been a serial burnout for years. It's only over the last year and half that I've learned to rein it in and take lots of breaks.
Our brains can only sustain high performance for so long before they need to cool down. Frequent breaks help you reset even if you think it breaks your concentration. If you keep pushing you hit the great motivator killer - burnout.
Bonus, taking breaks help you get out of mental ruts and you'll learn faster.
Anyway, there's a lot of science behind all this and I'm happy to elaborate... maybe worth a blog post... it's been a while :P
Your advice is healthy -- nothing bad about it at all!
However "sustain high performance for so long before they need to cool down" is common sense to many people and is at the same time very wrong. The clue is in the first point you shared about breaks and variety.
Our minds (and perhaps our bodies in general) wear down doing one thing like a machine. That kind of high performance is not sustainable -- it is exhausting.
High performance is sustainable when we expand what we mean by performance. When performance is about getting the most important things done when they should be done -- the big picture; then there is an opportunity to mix things up while performing at a high level sustainably.
Sometimes switching from one important thing to another is itself a break. And breaks done right do prevent breakdowns.
I would really love to see a blog post on this. I'd like to understand myself better and bringing in the science is very compelling.
Recently, I stay motivated by staying up most of the night watching Netflix then waking up at 9 am very groggy, forgetting what day it is, drinking lots of coffee, and taking naps at 4 pm.
HOLD IT, what was your question again?
;))
It's different for different people. Everyone has their own definition of "meaningful" work.
For me it would be arranging a call with my CEO, CTO etc every 1-2 months and ask them how our product or service has progressed in terms of the actual number of people we're serving. This does not include just the people who have an account with us or have downloaded our app, rather our whole circle of influence, so to speak. Programmers in my view very often tend to get "lost in code" and boredom inevitably follows at some point in time. Someone showing you the bigger picture once in a while helps with that. It makes you re-realize that what you're doing is actually impactful. And I'm not talking about value-judging the impact at all (that's where everybody's own "meaning" comes in), just the scale of it.
Also, just hit the gym and keep some weights at home even.
To be honest, I think in the past a lot of my motivation came from unhealthy places - imposter syndrome / feeling like I needed to do more to be 'good enough'.
It took a little touch of burn out to get past that, and now I think I've got a good system where every time I start to feel demotivated, I break down why I'm doing something. What am I getting out of it? Is it interesting to me? Am I enjoying it? Will it have a positive effect on others?
I keep track of side projects and ideas in Notion and add those notes directly to the task, so whenever I'm picking it up / reminding myself what I've got in my 'personal backlog', I'm also reminded of why the hell I would bother.
Personally, I think you don't have to stay (if you even are?) motivated all the time.
I know so many people who pay a lot of time and emotional stress for thoughts about "how to find motivation", "keep motivated", "overcoming a bad mood" and similar mind states.
It is very important to reflect yourself but when you do, rather than asking yourself what your motivation is or can be, ask yourself other questions.
Here are a few which I use from time to time:
Those are just a few of the questions I use to reflect myself in situations where I have a task I'm not happy with, being in a siutation I don't like or with people I don't like to spend time with and other.
I learned for myself that it is totally fine to say No if you don't like the task, don't like to spend time with people, don't want to finish the project you are close to get done or even a job offer.
As long as you can live with yourself and your decisions, you are already motivated. As soon as it changes, reflect yourself and take action. An action can even be that you keep doing / going but then you made yourself clear why you do it at least.
This helps you more than only trying to answer the question for motivation.