It was a cold winter Saturday afternoon. I had nothing on my schedule, I started poking around the computer and internet. Before long I was downloading Visual Studio 2019. I was feeling like messing with some coding and programming for fun. Developer stuff has always been rather fun when I remove the time pressures and other pressures associated with it. I wanted to play with some code, I wanted it to be fun, I am not sure if it will mean anything to my career at large. Despite the fact coding might have zero career benefits at the moment, it seems as though it might be a great hobby to play with.
I spent about 5 years waist deep in being a web developer muddling about becoming a rather flawed developer. I haven’t had much reason to code much in the last year, life has taken turns elsewhere. I still have that skillset laying dormant and I would like to keep it. Doing some hobby coding seems like it could keep that stuff alive in my mind. It is not anywhere my top priority at the moment, so I am looking to approach it with a few rules, otherwise it becomes another out of control hobby.
Rule 1. I will be coding for fun, and not putting any hard effort into it, otherwise it will take away energy from other things that are far more important.
Rule 2. This is all a hobby and a learning experiment. It is to be treated as such, you know until some outside force like a job incentivizes me to view it in another way.
Rule 3. This is a night and weekend kind of thing. It is not work and can’t be treated as such, otherwise I will be messing with code when I should be doing something that is actually beneficial to me.
These are the rules I made with myself as I started to play with code that night. I think they are reasonable. In the past developer skills have always been something I was chasing impatiently. I think it would be fun to give it a try and just build quirky and fun things and see what happens.
I don’t really have any goals with this. To a degree I am doing this because I want a hobby that gets my brain away from fitness and writing based things. It can be fun to work on things that don’t matter.
So far I have installed new development tools, and started messing with some Asp.net Core to see what that is all about. I might not ever look at the code again, but the other night it was fun. So I get to call myself a developer again for a few days.