Whether it be between projects or because you were sick, when was the last time you had to limit your coding time? How do you deal with this time?
I personally cannot stop thinking about all the things I "should" be doing instead of resting. Do you have any tips?
How does consulting work?
You go to a farm, count the sheep, go to the farmer, tell him how many sheep he has. Now demand your paycheck
Sounds simple enough! LOL
For me, it was one month. I was sick and resting. And I got to the conclusion that I love coding but I want to stop coding at the same time. I will stop coding when I have a successful business that will free me from work. Until then, I'll keep coding!
Since I started coding professionally, not very long. Even when I've been between jobs, I've done work on open source projects. Probably the longest period with zero coding was about three weeks. That was when I went on vacation without a computer in 2016.
Hopefully you were able to enjoy your vacation without thinking about coding
Oh wow !! I don't think I would last six months
Six years. Situational requirement. But continuing to study, and to build mental models of code, and language structures, and algorithms was a constant. Filling journals and notebooks with tens of thousands of lines of code, that I would never type but that would only ever be run between my ears.
After that, sitting down to program again? I found that the mental models I'd been building were robust and reliable, and remarkably accurate. Honestly, while it sucked, that time was the best thing that happened to my development skills.
I have to sleep, sometime.
😅😂😂😂
Ahh quite interesting ! How would someone get started with consulting?
Makes sense. Thanks for the information :D I'll look more into it
More than 3 months when I was between jobs. After such a long period its like you are not a programmer anymore because I was doing a different job during that period 🥲
1 week .-.
Connections, connections, connections....
Not a single day in the last 3 years, not proud of it but it is what it is.
I am sure once you get back into it things will start flowing again 😀 I once had a long period without coding because I was caught up doing other things.
Three years - 2018-2021. I had a lot of loss the least of was my laptop, and large chunks of my memory due to 'epileptic aphasia', compound concussions. The most is loss to a word that I won't expand on but I hope that this message resonates with somebody when they feel loss.
I was still maintaining a couple of WordPress sites badly. Every time I would have a cluster of seizures (every few months) I would forget any mental progress I made and developed #imposter syndrome#.
I have always had an interest in code. From making basic HTML sites when I was young, learning the CSS hacks we used ten years ago, the revolution of GULP.js. Taking a huge site, minifying it, compressing it, concatenating it, compressing it and then serving static cached content. Ignore the next two paragraphs if you want - it isn't me tooting my horn, I am genuinely proud of what I achieved while ordering it in a head with a non traditional memory.
See I want to give some context, specially to people who haven't seen how far we have come. In the last ten years I have wrote hundreds of thousands words on SEO (some of it looks laughable now, but was relevant at the time so remains relevant to old codebase. I am updating my website so won't leave a link. Google me to find a website that I broke working through a concussion on, but has information and tools which might be laughable now, but it isn't 2014 anymore.
I worked on benchmarking and trying to crack pieces of Google's algorithm back when the Big Seo discord was actually not so big and felt like a team - discussing data science, spearman Vs pearsons rank correlation studies. I was making infographics. I was a jack of all trades but my focus was minifying the web and removing dead content. I also like helping sole traders or very small businesses.
Then I broke. I actually really want to thank you for giving me a place to order my thoughts and am hesitant to write this.
It took a lot of updating myseIf to the new world of frameworks now am back to my original goal of making the web as accessible as possible while minifying and compressing everything I can.
You need the right tools for the job and strongly agree with Tim Burners-Lee and Ryan Dhal. People have taken the wrong path - Devs develop for Devs rather than the end user. Do you know the energy and carbon cost of the internet?
I hope the summery of the last decade of my life helps anyone who will inevitably feel loss, grief and maybe burnout. I am not sure what good dev said this first but #all good Devs feel impostor syndrome# - at some point- it is what keeps us learning and creating.
3 weeks, but I think regular "pauses" (like a weekend or a couple of days) can be helpful to get some fresh air.
May I ask what pro gambling is? Where would you recommend to travel and leave all coding thoughts behind?
I had a lot of trouble typing for about 6 month. I had the same problem, it was a hard time.
In the worst I wasn't able to do anything, so I send a lot of time on daily tasks. Later I started reading the OCP Java Certificate book. I read a lot of articles, too. But it wasn't easy to select articles in a way they didn't make me want to programm even more.
I asked so work together with others in a kind of one-sided pair programming but it was refused because in pair programming both must always time the same amount of time and you have to type with twice your speed. 🙄
I spent a lot of time visiting hardware shops and later started to go to a thermal bath on a regular basis.
3 full months at the end of the pandemic, after years of coding almost every day.
I would say went with out a
El es
It was a year for me, mostly because of burnout and to get my financial situation taken care of. I’m back now with a clearer mind, continuing my journey to become a web developer.
I missed doing web dev my whole high school as my parents told me to focus on studies. But now I'm pretty consistent and can't even imagine not doing coding.
After I was able to find a job, I think the longest I took break from coding is maybe about 2 and half month. When covid19 came and scrambled my first Job.