Although the majority of developers know why programming is exciting, you might wonder for ways to make it funnier.
I've recently asked on the Instagram of HereWeCode the following question: "What small tutorials do you want to see on the account?". One of the followers answered me: "How to make coding interesting?". I was surprised because I never asked myself.
After a few hours of searching, I share with you different ways to make programming funnier.
Why coding is exciting
In my opinion, IT, in general, is exciting. We live in a world where computers are one of the most important things. As we speak, programming is not a skill that everyone has. Being able to develop your project is this world is a chance. Everything is possible thanks to IT technology, and we live in a key period where there are not enough developers to satisfy the need.
Coding is a creative skill, and it's exciting to be a part of a project. Although mobile apps and websites are everywhere, I talked with a lot of people who don't know how it's working.
My speech may seem a bit over-selling and over-played, but it's the reason why coding is exciting for me.
That's one of the reasons why I take so much pleasure in creating educational content.
How to make it funnier
After thinking about it, although programming is now a passion for me, I remembered that it hasn't always been fun for me.
Mostly when I started, I was stuck for days on a problem, sometimes I completely lost hope and said: "This is not for me", "I tried everything, and it still does not work. I'm not that good.".
If that's the case with you, I can tell you, everybody's been there.
This situation can also happen for many other reasons. For example, when you are bored with a language or a framework because you use it too much.
Anyway, you don't have to be worried about it. I listed a few tips to give you a dose of fun when you need it.
Practice
The code is like doing Golf. When you start, it's not funny. You need to learn everything, which golf driver to use for tapping in such a way, how to position yourself, etc. The pleasure will come as you go along when you understand things and start to have fun with them.
Don't just read code, run it
Just follow lessons by reading the code is one of the significant problems when people start programming. When you are learning how to code, you should try by yourself. Take the time to do it, you will understand better, and you will have fun trying to modify the code to create your programs.
One other example, when you are searching for a code on GitHub, why not try it? It can be funny to understand the work of someone and be able to integrate it into your project.
Put a dose of fun into your projects or apprenticeships
When you are bored with one technology or if you want to enlarge your knowledge, you can learn a new library, framework or language. It can be interesting for you and help you to try new things and have fun doing them.
However, I don't recommend you only learn and follow a course. If you do so, after a few days, you will be bored. You should every day or chapter, create small projects to encourage you, and let your creativity do things.
Try to find some fun projects. For example, imagine you are learning the basics of Javascript. Even if it's the most important, it cannot be enjoyable. Once you know how to get user inputs and print in the console, why not trying to create a simple "chatbot" answering some sentences of your user.
Chatbot example
When I was doing my search to answer the question, I found this story from a user of Quora, and I liked it. It's an excellent example of how to put fun into your apprenticeships.
"Another thing - the worst is learning a new thing - it is usually very challenging, and your progress is much slower than you wish it were. To make that fun, I typically trick my brain. For example, when I was learning about assembly language, and we had a project to program a tiny hardware display - well first, it was very dull. You had to study the hardware manual, it had inputs and outputs, and all you could achieve was a few letters to appear on the screen. But I challenged myself to master that thing, and to do that, I came up with my own "special exercise". Instead of merely writing 10101 on display, I came up with the idea to write something more stupid, more childish. Something like - ——CALL -ME - NOW -XXXX — flashing and moving over the screen - this was WAY more advanced than the actual task we had been assigned in class. I just used this stupid thing to motivate myself to learn everything I could about assembly languages, and boy, this worked out well! :)" — Marcus Biel
Always challenge yourself
When you are a developer, you ever need to learn new things to stay updated. Everything is evolving quickly, and you can't be outdated. Boredom or lack of fun occurs when you no longer feel like you are growing or learning.
To counteract this feeling, you can try to achieve goals that you have not yet completed.
For example, if you have never participated in an open-source project, you can search on GitHub and contribute for the first time.
Your sense of satisfaction will be increased when you succeed in having your work accepted within the project. Perhaps you will help dozens, even hundreds of people, by fixing a previously unresolved problem.
You can also participate in coding competitions or use coding websites such as HackerRank, CodingGame, or Project Euler to challenge yourself.
Create a personal project from scratch
It can be frustrating to be a developer in your daily life and work on only a small part of the project you are developing for your company.
Maybe you have always dreamed about a project, but you never took the time to work on it. Why not try to code it? You will see, it's fun to start the project of your dreams. It's also a worthy goal to make your programming habit stick.
If you don't have any ideas, try to find a theme you like, for example:
- If you like video games, you can try to create a game.
- If you are into education, why not creating tutorials around code.
- If you love hardware and electronics, why not build an Arduino or a raspberry pi.
"Programming is like writing - in the main subject matters much more than the writing itself." — lifeisstillgood
Define a goal
That point is always coming back in all of my productivity articles. You must define goals.
Without goals, it's challenging to feel comfortable and enjoy what you are doing as a developer.
Find a mentor
A mentor can be motivating if you don't find fun anymore while coding.
It can give you a goal to follow and teach you the best practices, help you to improve your programming skills, and stimulate your professional career.
Perhaps you are wondering how to ask your "hero" to become your mentor?
Just send a message and ask him/her to be your mentor.
Yeah yeah, it's that simple. Maybe, he/she will be pleased to know that you value his/her skills enough to mentor you. In most cases, he/she will be delighted to accompany you in your development.
Sleep more
When you are in a downward spiral, programming becomes less fun. Sometimes it can be difficult for you to move forward and thrive in your work. Go to bed earlier for a few nights or sleep later in the morning for a few days, and everything should be fine.
Show your work
What's worse than being a developer and losing all hope because you're alone in your basement? It's a bit of a cliché but, believe me, when you work for a long time alone on a project and never show it to anyone, it becomes less fun right away.
This tip is close to the previous ones. Once you share your work, people will make suggestions or ask questions. It's going to be challenging for you and help you to fix new goals.
Conclusion
I tried to regroup the essential tips to have fun while programming. If you have any other advice or suggestions to make it funnier, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.
If you want more content like this, you can follow me on Twitter, where I tweet about web development, self-improvement, and my journey as a fullstack developer!
Top comments (16)
I've said it before, coding is pretty much magic, you write some spells and if they are right, something happen, sometimes around the world, sometimes you make some robot move or some distant gizmo to tell you stuff about where it is; you can be a wizard and control your environment with your code, a necromancer rising hundreds of un-living robots, a warlock invoking some ML to solve mysteries mere humans don't understand, or.. you know... sell some spells to make some money :]
and besides, the technical prowess of modern computers, the fact that the transistor gates nowadays are in nm, that we are about to hit quantum effects in the transistors when a few decades ago a tube was 10cm long, that this post was written in some small country in the other side of the planet and almost instantly all of you can read it (maybe you don't want, but you can!), and to make all those wonders you just need a 100USD device (hopefully a larger one), you can get a Raspberry Pi for almost nothing, Arduinos for even less and the controllers for even less!. And no, I won't mention smartphones, I hate them, those are evil. But the rest, is amazing. Satellites!, cmon, we have satellites!, GPS needs to take into account relativistic effects!, awesome, absolutely awesome.
We are living in the age of the nerd, and is awesome.
Well, if that's not a message of love for IT, I don't know what to say!
We live in the best of all times to create new things and participate in our future.
At the moment, i feel boring about my programming skill. I don't have my first project, but i always like learn new technology and programming language. After i read your post, i felt better yesterday. Thank you for your post. Good luck to you :>.
Doing small projects is the key to getting better and avoiding the dull period.
Good luck with your learning. You will find success in it! 😀
People get used to everything. We are bored of coding using editors with fancy text formatting and endless sea of functional features. Imagine what we would do, if we had to code in built-in Notepad. xdd
That would be complicated! 😝 Btw, Notepad++ is a good software to code in a complex framework such as Symfony!! 😂
I actually started with Notepad++ :)
Lol, imagine to develop like some MERN app using just Notepad xdd
How to die in 4 steps 😂
😂😂
We just got a brand new web app at work and it only works in IE. I died a little.
I’m becoming a fan! Really like your articles and style.
Thank you, Andrea! It means a lot to me because I spend a lot of time on this project! I'm so glad you like it! 🙏☺️
Great Info..
Thank you! 🙏
Really nice way to put it all up :)
Thank you! 😊