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So you burned out on coding. Now what?

Jessi Shakarian on July 01, 2021

Burnout happens. It happened to me 6 months ago. Only in the last 2-3 weeks have I been feeling re-energized to begin again. Here's the most impor...
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Christopher Johnston

I understand this so much. When I started my bootcamp I watched all the videos for class, read all the articles, listened to coding podcasts in the car and when I was exercising or washing dishes, and read articles on sites like this in my free time. I even stopped watching TV and just watched coding videos on YouTube instead. I used to think there was something wrong with me but this is a side effect of my ADHD.

I burned out hard about 11 months in; I didn't want to look at code, read about it, or talk about it. It was Virtual Coffee that got me back into code and I'm eschewing web technologies like JS and Node on favor of Python and math.

I'm pursuing this AWS Machine Learning Scholarship and whether I get or not it will strengthen some key skills that I want to improve and it might help in my next journey. I'm seriously considering another bachelor's, but in mechanical engineering this time. 🛠️

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Jessi Shakarian

We definitely have the same type of ADHD.

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Sam Sonter

i just keep reading books to know basics

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Rex

Might be off topic here. I use an awesome software called workrave and stick to a practice called Tomato to help me with burn out. Basically every half an hour or so, workrave stops me from working on the computer and forces me to take a break for 5 minutes. Learned the practice from Clean Coder Robert Martin. With this, I am more productive and burn out a lot slower. The breaks also helps to breaking through problems. A short break from a problem on hand, gives my brain a chance to digest and often end up seeing the problem from different perspective and solve it. Also a non stop 25/30 minutes is focused and very efficient.

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Rutik Wankhade

It's the pomodoro technique. I use that too.

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Rex

Yes, Pomodoro. Nothing enforce the breaks as well as workrave. A bit thanks to the developers.

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Sophia Brooks

Hmm, not exactly 6 months but like 2.

Have you had burnout? Yes, of course, i am also diagnosed with ADHD.
What did you to help yourself through it? Nothing to be honest, I Do love my job, however if i just take a 1-2 month break, everything gets resolved.
Did you return to the programming language you started in? Well i don't do specifically one language, as i work for a company that uses a lot of technologies such as JavaScript, C, Python, and more.

Because i also work with ML, and APIs.

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commdao

Like you, I started with HTML/CSS and only now am starting to make some headway with JavaScript. What concept of JS were you at when you needed to take a break?

This week I'm tackling ternary operators, loops, and setTimeout().

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Jessi Shakarian

I was somewhere around where you are - ternary operators, methods, I just didn't have the bandwidth to keep at it. But I hit HTML/CSS pretty hard, and was coming from a place of knowing almost nothing about coding, so it was a lot of information for me at that time.

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TyrWinDev

Excellent article 👍 The burnout is real ! And it's so difficult to manage your frustration if you don't have a way to separate yourself from coding. Gonna put this in practice. Thank you !

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Jessi Shakarian

Thank you. Hope it helps you out!

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Jaira Encio

This is great, I'm so burned out right now i just wanna do a career shift of being HR or flight attendant instead haha