When did you last write code just because?
I began writing this post on the 29th of December, 2017 and only got back to it today. The initial title was: When did you last code for yourself? but experiences I’ve had this year inspired the new title. One thing is also true about the day I started this and the day I finished it: I was on a break from work; away from the daily madness and pressure to deliver work every week.
I’ve spent most of the last year and a half working in engineering teams, picking up tasks, delivering tasks, reviewing team members' tasks, doing demos for said tasks, planning for more tasks, picking up more tasks, hitting blockers on tasks, you get the drift.
This was okay, for a while. It was great figuring things out in a sprint cycle, fighting bugs and learning a whole lot in record time. Near ideal conditions fueled an insatiable fire in me and I loved it. I was hooked, I worked all the time, even weekends.
This high however was short-lived. Teams changed and with it came different sets of dynamics. Different expectations, some realistic and some I did not agree with. I found myself in situations that demanded I grow in more than my technical skills and I was thrown off.
What were these curve balls? What did they mean my ideas were nice but not immediately applicable? Why was it so hard to have a clear direction of what we were trying to do?
I came face-to-face with the realities of engineering teams across the world and I realized soon enough how unrealistic the expectations I had set were. I found myself in a place where one of the things that mattered the most to me — the quality of my work — was attacked and I couldn’t deal.
I woke up one day and I did not want to see my code editor or terminal. I hated ALL of it. All while chasing down a deadline. I wanted to pause it for a while, 2 weeks, maybe a month, but I couldn’t at the time because I couldn’t take vacation with zero notice.
I was shook. How was this possible???
It took me a while to realize what was going on. It wasn’t until I spoke to my teammate when she told me about a recent time she’d found herself in a similar situation. What brought her out of it was going back to the reason she started coding in the first place.
I realized at that moment that I’d forgotten why I started coding. I was burned out, I had taken a lot of responsibility on my shoulders and I was getting weighed on by some personal issues. I had everyone pulling at me in all directions and I rarely said no.
I knew I couldn’t carry out the course correction I needed at that point. The code I did not want to write was going to have to do and I had to figure it out.
I began to deliberately knock off time to write code I’d probably never use. If I felt like building a simple API in Node.js, I did it. If I felt like React Native the next day, I branched off a project and did it. If I felt like watching cat videos an entire afternoon, I did.
I started projects I had no intention of seeing through to the end. No pressure to turn it into a tutorial; no pressure to finish or debug code; no pressure to make UIs beautiful or improve on UX; heck I even made one of the least validated login forms because I could.
Breaking rules with no consequences did me good. It gave me the break I needed from tightly coupled team rules and constant scrutiny of my work and it helped me enjoy writing code again.
I was writing code just because.
This is not only limited to code though. I think it’s especially applicable to creatives who do commercial work as well. I’ve listened to countless of my friends talk about how they can’t wait to submit a client project so they can go design, paint or take pictures for themselves.
When did you last write code just because?
