Yup, I Still Like Programming

So last semester one of the existential crises I was having was whether I still like programming. The teaching season of the semester ended a few weeks ago, and my dissertation submission happened at the start of this week, and I already have an answer for this conundrum.

Yes I do. I like programming very much.

For the past few months, I've been mainly working on either coursework, or my dissertation project. Latter I have considered a failure quite early on and my opinion has not changed now that I completed it. It simply did not live to my expectations, and it was mainly due to me limiting its scope severely. A rare problem for me. Anyway, if you would like to see who you are dealing with, you can read my dissertation, I guess. Point is, I did it out of necessity, I did not enjoy myself while doing it.

Same for coursework - despite some of it being quite interesting, I found myself going through a path of least resistance, bashing out inefficient code when I'm not marked for efficiency, not bothering to shorten it, commenting out of necessity. I was doing it for the grade and it was all that mattered. In this occasion, at least I can blame the very specific requirements for the assignments that would not really work for anything outside the vacuum of that small specific task being done, so why bother?

But immediately, the same week I became (relatively) free (there's still an exam my dude), I have started on side projects.

First, I began by rewriting a website that was just a bunch of static pages with Vue. I realized that I am not adding any functionality and it would suck to just tack on unnecessary JavaScript dependence on a site that worked fine without. So I found Gridsome, and rewrote the site in that. I learned a bunch of stuff in the process, including GraphQL, which is both great and I hate it. The website was for a certain podcast that I'm not linking directly :P. Oh, I also started hosting audio files with Google Cloud (not to get confused with Google's other cloud storage service - Google Drive), which is paid, but effectively free for the amount of space I'm using.

The second thing was a long-time coming, because I've been thinking about it for a while - an album collage Discord bot from last.fm listening history. It was super easy, because I used Python, and everything is super easy in Python. This was a rare case where both APIs were actually incredibly easy to use and comprehend. On the other hand, a bit more elbow grease will be required if I want to make the bot work with Discord's slash (/) commands. It was incredibly fun to bash out and see people mess about with it hours later.

So, what's the conclusion? I suppose I'm just really bad at formal learning, or I don't have an attention span for it. Alternatively, it's the mental play/work dichotomy, and just by placing an activity in either context, makes me feel vastly differently about it. It's probably a mix of both.

Funnily enough, I have been looking forward to reading all this time, and I procrastinated that with all this development fun. Could it be that I am now mentally putting reading books into the "chore" camp, and thus trying to avoid it? Or maybe it's just my disintegrating attention span... But that's a story for another time.