The Side Project That Made Me Enjoy Programming Again

I used to think burnout came from working too much.

Then I built a side project that consumed my evenings, weekends, and most of my free time — and somehow, it made me enjoy programming again.

I’ve been programming since I was a teenager.

My mother bought me a PHP/MySQL book when I was young, and I still remember the feeling of building my first form in PHP. It felt almost unreal that a few lines of code could create something interactive.

I studied electrical engineering, but programming slowly became the thing I cared about most. At first, it was pure curiosity. I built things because it was fun.

Then it became a career.

I worked at a software house, later at a fintech company, and eventually at another product company. Like many developers, I followed the standard path: deadlines, sprint planning, releases, maintenance work, technical debt, meetings.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped enjoying it.

My first burnout happened during my time at the fintech company. I had spent three years doing work that felt increasingly repetitive. Nothing was technically wrong with the job. The company was stable, maybe too stable.

It's not like that every day felt identical. I was just tired of the domain. 3 years of the same code, 3 years of the same problems.

I had to change something.

I tried to fix the problem externally. I reduced my hours. I moved to another country. I changed my environment and started working part-time.

None of it worked.

Even working only three days a week felt exhausting because the real problem wasn’t the workload. It was that I no longer felt connected to what I was building.

Eventually, I quit.

After a short break, I joined another company where I had much more ownership. I started a project from scratch, worked closely with a small team, and had real influence over the product and technical decisions.

For a while, that changed everything.

Building became exciting again. My ideas mattered. I wasn’t just implementing tickets anymore — I was shaping the system itself.

Then, two years later, the burnout returned.

That second burnout was worse because it made less sense.

I liked the company.
I liked the product.
The work was objectively more interesting.

And yet I still struggled to force myself through even simple tasks. Some mornings I would stare at my screen unable to start. Even interesting problems felt emotionally heavy.

I took a few weeks of unpaid leave because I knew I was reaching a breaking point.

During that time, I started writing again.

Writing had been one of my childhood hobbies long before programming became my career. I wrote constantly during those weeks — essays, ideas, random reflections. Most of it was probably bad, but it gave me something I had been missing for years: the feeling of creating without permission. Believe me or not, I wanted to quit my job and become a professional writer. I had a few ideas in my mind.

Then a few days before coming back, while sitting on the couch with my girlfriend and talking through all of this for the hundredth time, she reminded me of an old idea of hers.

“Remember that app I told you to build?”

I remembered, but I didn't believe in it.

There were a few other reasons why I ignored it. The most important one: I didn’t know mobile development. My experience was mostly backend engineering, infrastructure, and web systems. Building an app felt far outside my reach.

But around that time, tools like ChatGPT and Claude Code had started changing the way I worked.

Suddenly, the barrier to experimentation felt much lower.

I no longer needed weeks of setup and documentation before trying something unfamiliar. I could prototype quickly, ask questions instantly, and iterate without getting stuck for hours on small problems.

So I decided to try.

At first, the project completely consumed me. I developed an API first. Then the mobile app, Quick Dart Tutorial, helped me a lot, but mostly the code was written by AI. I was giving instructions.

I worked after my regular job, late into the night, and through most weekends. Ironically, I was now working far more than I had before burnout.

But the experience felt completely different.

I was learning again.

I learned mobile development, deployment pipelines, security concerns, app store releases, UI decisions, and marketing. I started to build a foundation on being the founder. And this was exciting!

Five or six months later, I launched my first app. Givore is a platform where people post things they don't want and want to give away or things they found on the street.

The first version wasn’t perfect (the current one is far from being perfect). But the project changed my relationship with programming in a way I didn’t expect.

Somewhere during those months, coding stopped feeling like maintenance and started feeling creative again.

The most surprising part was that this energy slowly spilled back into my regular job. Ideas from my side project started influencing my work. Features I experimented with privately later became useful discussions at work. I became more curious, more engaged, and more willing to explore solutions instead of just completing tasks.

The side project didn’t reduce my workload. **If anything, I worked (and am still working) far more than ever.

But burnout was never only about hours.

It was about boredom, lack of curiosity, and routine.

Building something for myself saved my career but also made me realize something big about myself: I'm a builder. A creator who can make anything. And thanks to this project, I discovered that those characteristics are not about programming skill but about my personality, and I can apply them to any domain I want.