It's okay to not to code in your free time in your personal projects

#programming #productivity

Hello! Merry Christmas!

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a developer. There’s a chance you love to code. You love coding so much that even in holidays, you work on your personal projects that you’ll definitely not going to abandon in the next month.

For most of the developers, programming is passion. It’s often a hobby for one that the person can also turn into a profession. 70.42% of developers say they code as a hobby, according to stackoverflow survey

But this hobby + passion + carrier, just like any other profession/leisure work, has its own toll on you. You may think you’re enjoying your personal projects, but it is possible you’re overworking, especially if you’re also a professional programmer. We’ll all like working on new projects that we envision to succeed. But unsurprisingly, many of them are mirages. But at least we can from our mistakes.

Often times, developers create personal projects that solve a problem that the individual and many people are facing in the community. It’s like making a missing piece of a puzzle. These projects most of the time turns into a big open source project. And now all of a sudden you’re a maintainer of an open source project. But this is good. This is something we (excluding you) all want. But do you want it?

Maintaining an Open Source project, doing a job, studying (if you’re a student), facing + implementing + closing feature requests and bug requests, these are tedious work. Also, at this point we become so obsessed with our project that we often neglect health, close ones and even the carrier/studies. So the best way to avoid this is not doing it alone. Ask for help from others. Create a community and a moderation group and share your project with them. It’ll make everything better for everyone.

Take weekly breaks

Personal health is above anything. No passion, profession is not worth more than your life. It’s normal, when we’re passionate about something, we want to do that all the time. But this is when we burned out. Stress and over excitement steers us to worse health. So take a break from this. Separate yourself from your personal projects and if possible your job. Go on vacation or hiking or cycling. Chat with friends in a BBQ party or just enjoy your life.

Take daily breaks

A job, personal projects, studying/parenting altogether makes anyone’s life a hell. So no matter what, make sure to have personal time every day. After a long period of work, don’t just straight go and work on your personal projects. Take some rest, eat and enjoy for a while and then in the remaining 1–2 hours work on those projects. Or if you’re too passionate about your projects, do a part-time job and work on your personal projects in the remaining hours. But make sure your projects are profitable so you won’t be broke.

Conclusion

I know it’s a pretty shitty article. Although I wrote it myself, It's still worse than an AI. But I recently faced burn-outs, stress, exam stress, result stress and a total breakdown basically. The only thing helped me recover was touching the grass and forgetting about this side of my life for a while. Cycling, playing football (soccer) helped me a lot too. And, obviously, a group of good friends.

So go out, forget about programming. And enjoy the remaining days of this terrible year of 2023. Hopefully, 2024 will be better (it usually gets worse when you hope for better next year, so this time I’m hopeless for 2024 tbh)