#TimeManagement #CodingAsAHobby #BalancingAct #PersonalDevelopment #CodingGoals
Do you ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to pursue your passion for coding in a meaningful way? 🕐 As someone in their late 30’s juggling a career in cybersecurity alongside other responsibilities, finding time to code can be a real challenge. You may have big dreams of releasing your own project one day, but with only an hour here and there to spare, it can feel like an impossible task. 😔
## The Struggle is Real
You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the demands of daily life and struggling to find time for your coding projects. Balancing work, family, and personal obligations can leave you with precious little time to dedicate to your hobby. The continuous cycle of starting and stopping, refreshing your skills, and feeling like you’re not making progress can be discouraging. It’s easy to start questioning whether it’s worth the effort to continue pursuing your coding goals. 💻
## Practical Solutions
1. **Set Realistic Goals**: Instead of aiming for a large, ambitious project, break it down into smaller, manageable tasks that you can work on in short bursts of time each day. This way, you can make steady progress towards your goal without feeling overwhelmed.
2. **Prioritize Your Time**: Identify pockets of time throughout your day where you can squeeze in some coding, whether it’s during your lunch break, early in the morning, or on weekends. By prioritizing your coding time, you can ensure that you make consistent progress.
3. **Focus on Small Wins**: Celebrate even the smallest achievements, whether it’s fixing a bug, completing a function, or learning a new concept. By acknowledging your progress, you’ll stay motivated and inspired to keep going.
4. **Join a Coding Community**: Surround yourself with like-minded individuals who understand the challenges you’re facing and can offer support, advice, and motivation. Engaging with a community can help you stay accountable and inspired to continue coding.
5. **Embrace Imperfection**: Remember that perfection is not the goal. It’s okay if your projects are not flawless or groundbreaking. The important thing is that you’re learning, growing, and enjoying the process of coding.
## Conclusion
While it may feel daunting to pursue coding with limited free time, it is possible to create something meaningful and fulfilling with just a few hours to spare each week. By setting realistic goals, prioritizing your time, focusing on small wins, engaging with a community, and embracing imperfection, you can make steady progress towards your coding aspirations. Don’t let the lack of time hold you back – with determination and dedication, you can achieve your coding goals and bring your projects to life. 🚀
It’s definitely something you need to set aside a lot of time for.
On the aspect of releasing software, bear in mind a lot of people who have never studied computer science, nor worked as a professional software engineer, have programmed successful games. You do not need perfect code to make a successful game. It just needs to be enjoyable and have minimal bugs.
I was a hobbyist programmer and later worked as a software engineers. The difference between the two is that you learn to use methods and best practices that make your code better. And those things are: conventions, SOLID principles, design patterns, using libraries rather than implementing your own solutions, data structures, algorithms, programming paradigms, file structure, etc. But at the core of it all is problem-solving skills, which is something you develop also as a hobbyist.
So learn those methods and best practices and you’ll be more of a professional programmer than a hobbyist.
Same here mate.
I feel that in order for me to properly be productive, I need a couple hours of uninterrupted focus to really get into the code and the business logic and architecture of my project in order to code anything meaningful. An hour here or there just doesn’t cut it. That’s barely enough time for me to rebuild my mental model of what I’m working on, how it should be built, what the potential issues and solutions are, etc.
Even when I work on something for MONTHS, I barely make any progress.
At work, I make lots of progress. So I know the issue isn’t my skill level or anything. The difference really is just that I’ve got those 8 hours set aside for work every day, and that time is respected. There are generally no non-work related interruptions. My spare time, however, cannot be planned and respected the same way. If anything happens that I need to take care of, it will need to be done in my spare time. Chores? Spare time. Tax declaration? Spare time. Grocery shopping? Spare time. Exercise? Spare time. Pension planning? Spare time. Looking into insurance policies for upcoming trip? Spare time. Laptop is acting up and I need to troubleshoot it or look into buying a new one? Spare time. And I’m not even mentioning everything that comes with being married and living abroad, or any of my other hobbies, or just general life and relationship issues, or any downtime to avoid burnout…
seem like you lack motivation which result in a broken discipline. IMO, the most important question that you need to ask yourself is how bad do you want it? It is impossible to build anything meaningful without a great contribution. You will need to spend so much time with it, day in and day out. That’s why the reason behind what you do is important because it’s tired and exhausted. You will quite if you don’t know your reason. You also need to be enjoy with it in every single minute.
it’s a great question! In general, it seems like you have the interest in desire to do something, but maybe the clarity is not always there regarding what it is you’re trying to accomplish. My suggestion would be to treat this like a excellent learning opportunity with a bit of project management thrown in.
1. Create a Goal: Identify what you’re trying to create.(make this the goal of your project.) to provide a working example let’s pretend you wanting to create a TicTacTioe game— which incidentally is the first program I wrote when I was learning c++ backbefore we had electricity(but we really didn’t have Internet and so programming was out of a book)
2. Let’s assume your intended platform is Windows. So next, draw out what you think the ideal user interface would be—pencil and paper is OK, but if you can find a free or cheap diagraming or flow chart program, that would be better (my opinion) especially with limited time–and if you and were working together on this 8 hours a day, I guarantee that the first version of the user interface will not be the final one.
3. Model out the functionality you’ll need. Which could look like this:
* something to only allow valid moves
* something to track the current state of the board
* sonething to manage user play(who’s turn, did user win)
* something to manage the user interface
* something to draw the user interface
Notice so far, we haven’t talked about programing language or programming with a specific set of tools. In other words all the way through step three this could be typed out in a text file or paper. You could spend a day, a week or a month in writing out all the details—NOT how to program It, but WHAT you’re creating and how you will know when you are done.
Speaking of done, once you’ve written out what you want to do and have decided to start working on billing it, don’t allow yourself to make changes to the overall plan or extend it add new features, etc.(in technical jargon is called scope creep, and it will kill a project quicker than anything – especially if you have limited time, adding new features will make it much harder to finish as well as figure out how to create it when you’re learning all at the same time so take notes. Add them to a separate piece of paper a new document, but do not start creating them until you’re done with the original design.
now, after having a detailed, you can start figuring out what language you want to use which programming tools and what the in products look like is it going to be an iPhone app a console app and windows? Do you eventually want to make a Windows presentation foundation clap application for the Windows desktop and online application. There are obviously lots of choices.
In our hypothetical example, if you were building the tic-tac-toe game in C sharp, I would suggest building a windows console app out first when it’s complete andcworkibg how you planned, then make it into a Windows presentation foundation application.
From a program perspective, this means that the initial coding is very focused and simple in the console application and that when you transition into the Moore complete WPF application changes to design patterns and methodology.
And if you’ve planned it well enough, you’ll notice that most your core code doesn’t have to change (much) to become the more advanced program
an hour a day is equal to ~45 8-hour days over the course of a year.
if you can’t get something meaningful done in that time, that’s a different problem, possibly motivation.
Maybe wake earlier and get your hour developing skills in after an early breakfast, instead of when your tired at night? Getting to bed early and waking early is underrated, it puts your passion during the time you have energy and your sleep in the time where you don’t.
Can you learn during work hours. That’s usually what I do, I pick up new skills when we have a bit of downtime, I also schedule a few hours every Friday.
Lots of companies encourage it, obviously there’s a balancing act between that and work.
Otherwise I’ll get up early on a Saturday and knock out 3-4 hours before I start my day.
I’m 43 full time job and kids. Wish I’d focused on coding in my 30’s when I had loads of free time. Now it’s hard to find time to code and same as you, it’s hard to move forward.
Same boat, but I’ve just started working full time.
It is NEVER too late. Companies are not looking for specific ages, they are looking for TALENT.
An hour is a good amount of time. You can build a project slowly each day during that timeframe. But yeah you gotta move past the textbook stuff and just go out and make your own scripts or tools. Struggle along the way, google what you need, and everything compounds. Eventually it will click and you’ll get to the end result.
But it takes consistent work and practice to get better. Make that one hour count each day.
I always have at least one side project going, although not always code related. However, I do development so I program everyday. I really think consistency is key. Decide whether you want to give up on this dream and use your time in other areas or whether you want to use your time to continue on this dream. The reason I say that, if you decide to continue, you must program everyday. You must not go weeks without touching an IDE. Even if it’s only 15 minutes a day, you will see cumulative results that way. I would also recommend starting with small projects that you can complete relatively quickly. Something with some challenge but not so much that you cannot make progress over weeks. You can always incorporate your smaller projects into larger ones later.
Why a bit late to become a software developer? 30yrs old? You’re young dude, you still can make it of you put your mind to it.
I agree that if you don’t have more than an hour after work, it’s going to be difficult to build and ship something.
Does your job offer opportunities for you to learn or contribute as a developer?
You could try moving that one hour to the morning, to be more productive and not half asleep. The one hour sounds plenty and you have the motivation, don’t give up on that!
Late 30’s…probably could get a CS degree slowly…a lot of States have classes and made degrees specific for the working man’s hours
Never to late honestly