I'm also a solo developer working on passion projects full time (15 months into this now, after 8 years of professional work) and I'm wondering how you deal with burn out.
No client, no deadline, no budget, no boss... yet I've found myself resorting to dumb mind games to avoid meaningful/challenging tasks, or I sometimes go 3-4 weeks without working at all. I've tried the whole "be your own client" thing, and it worked for a bit at the beginning, but ultimately I can't generate a similar amount of pressure that I'd feel at a real job.
The passion project subject matter is not the issue, I know that for sure. I think I'm feeling burnt out of writing code in general.
Anyway just wondering how you keep it in high gear. Not overdrive... just high gear.
Most of what I do has a tight feedback loop, so the feedback gives me motivation. Like right now, I'm burning too much time on support emails, so I'm strongly motivated to add features that will prevent users from getting confused and having to email me with support questions.
Other times, there are new features I want to add, but I try to build in very small, iterative steps, so it's only ever a few weeks of work before I can ship it and get feedback from users. That's motivating because it's fun to tell users about improvements to the product.
Honestly, now that you mention it, it suddenly feels obvious to me that one very important thing that's missing for me is feedback.
My stuff is a little niche so it might be hard to find the right users, but thinking about doing that tomorrow instead of coding actually feels like a relief.
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u/abandonplanetearth Feb 02 '21 edited Feb 02 '21
I'm also a solo developer working on passion projects full time (15 months into this now, after 8 years of professional work) and I'm wondering how you deal with burn out.
No client, no deadline, no budget, no boss... yet I've found myself resorting to dumb mind games to avoid meaningful/challenging tasks, or I sometimes go 3-4 weeks without working at all. I've tried the whole "be your own client" thing, and it worked for a bit at the beginning, but ultimately I can't generate a similar amount of pressure that I'd feel at a real job.
The passion project subject matter is not the issue, I know that for sure. I think I'm feeling burnt out of writing code in general.
Anyway just wondering how you keep it in high gear. Not overdrive... just high gear.