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Discussion on: How to motivate myself

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Jacob Landry

Find something you're passionate about and make it better.

Example: I'm a PHP developer and have been wanting a job in new languages, but it's incredibly hard to get a job in Java with 12 years of PHP on your resume, not because you're not capable, clearly your experience shows it, but because after 12 years, the job level you're coming in on requires previous experience.
So in order to learn java well enough that I feel comfortable adding it to my resume as a known language, I started a passion project.

I play Elite Dangerous, I bought Voice Attack which allows me to speak to my space ship and tell it what to do. It only works if you have a completely full key binds file, however. Since I've never taken the time (and don't plan to do so) to go through every single binding option in the game and bind some key combination to it, I'm writing a java app to do it for me. It accepts a valid binds file, finds all the current registered bindings, and all the empty ones, then finds all key combinations that are unused and fills in the blanks.
It's been a great way for me to learn Java, I feel fairly comfortable in the language already and I'm maybe 80% through the initial dev of the project.

Find something you love, find a language you want to learn, make the world a better place.