Coding after a hiatus

Gemini - panda coming back from a vacation

Taking a break from software development is something most developers go through around the 5-6 year mark. Namely, this is normally in the phase of burnout, not prioritizing things correctly for work/life balance, or just keeping up with the pace of new innovations (such as AI).

Adapting through any hiatus phase takes an adjustment. This is something I have been learning as of late after a break period, and here are some strategies in getting re-adjusted back into coding frame of mind

Here's what they are:

Rebuilding habits

There is a book called "Atomic Habits An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones". It's something I have referred to pretty often in my career and life, whenever I feel that discipline is slipping off the tracks

The summary of it is pretty simple - if you want to build good habits, make them easier to do, if you want to reduce bad habits, make them harder to do. Not exactly rocket science, but those two principles make for a pretty straight forward way to build on what is called the "1%" principle, which is similar to compounding effects in investing

Basically, if you improve 1% everyday in a given direction, by the end of the year it will be 1.01^365 or at 37x more better than you started with. The numbers and math don't exactly align this way, but the principle is these effects compound over time

Going through old works

This goes back to a post I wrote in 2024, dubbed maintaining a sense of self. Whenever I go through phases of life that are hard, and are difficult to process, I go back to the things I created. These serve as an anchor point to the person I want to be, as I have almost always have lived fairly true to myself (minus some instances where life really threw me a curveball).

This means going back to the things that got me started in software development, but not exactly just that - it's also rebuilding a new set of experiences in parallel to the ones that I originally started with.

So, for instance if I went through my career building tools for myself, I do just that. This means spinning back up old deprecated sites, and digging through the old set of logic I used to work on at that given time

Creating new experiences

In any life chapter transition, new experiences can rewrite old ones, but really it's on you to rewrite those sets of experiences. This means rebuilding what is I call a new train-of-thought process, which means taking old experiences and effectively rehashing it into a new set of experiences

So, for instance if you started your career going to meetups in a city (in my case Orlando), when I start over I just do that again in a new city (in this case Austin). Those experiences in a new city will parallel that of the old city, and the old methodology will serve as a guide on how to execute it, but there is a series of randomness in what those experiences will entail. That makes it more authentic and unique in nature, which drives and creates momentum to then build upon habits that were once lost

Not letting other's expectations drive you

There is an old saying that your worth is not dictated by any one particular person or people in life.

One of the books that I also like referring back to, is called "The courage to be disliked". When you want to do something, you will have people who will hate you, be jealous, envious, or just not care. This goes back to a lesson I learned in video games 10 years ago. Likewise, there will be those that support you during those hard times as well.

It's leaning into the support networks that originally drove you to do what you do best.

There is a balance though. Discouragement (and even encouragement) is a double edged sword, because at some point you will deviate from what you normally do by doing things based on an expectation from other(s).

It goes back to what the original motivations were for creating something. In this case, I have always written for myself, as a form of journaling / reflective authenticity

Ensuring things are maintained

This is perhaps the biggest one I have made a mistake on. Much of coding and it's infrastructure evolves over time, and it is a job in it's own in maintaining software. For some time, I didn't maintain this blog as I was going through life transitions, and this meant I didn't write much online either.

This applies from a rule I wrote called "Deciding what to keep", where it's not necessarily just a blogging site or a thing, but rather an entity as a whole.

Maintaining anything in life takes work, and there requires some level of discipline to keep the garden maintained.