Two months ago, I quit my job as a Java developer to start coding in Ruby on Rails. I had a good position managing a project and a small team and now I feel like a noob once again, and I absolutely love it. Don’t get me wrong, Viavansi is a great company to work in, with excellent conditions and a lot of great people. But now I realize that I was not enjoying my daily job and experiencing burnout.
I am currently investigating in the best way to build an API in Javascript to make it possible to connect to a Java backend and respond to client-side petitions coming from a Rails application.
Due to the design of the Java backend I am finding it really difficult to build the data graph I need, and most of the time I end up in a dead end and ditching a days work because I suddenly realize there is no way that the approach I’m taking will work. Having no prior experience coding in Javascript doesn’t make it easier.
The thing is that I really enjoy what I do, no matter I haven’t been able so far to make it work. To me, programming is like solving a puzzle. I don’t think I have the words to describe the satisfaction I feel when the pieces finally fit together.
In my opinion, a programmer should invest some time every day to improve your skills and catch up with new technologies, frameworks and libraries. I know a lot of people working in software development that lack any kind of curiosity whatsoever for computers. People that don’t use their computers at home because they don’t really like them, but who work 8 hours a day writing code.
In my opinion, being a programmer and not enjoying your work is a fast way to feeling sad and miserable. If you really don’t like doing it, I think you should considering a career change (easier to say than to do, I know).
Several days ago my girlfriend asked me
Hey, don’t you get bored of that programming stuff?
And my answer was
No, not at all
If you are programming and not having fun, you are doing it wrong.