I don’t know

> Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously. I remember once I was helping someone at work who was learning Python. They were having trouble understanding how binary file types worked. When it clicked for them, they were so delighted. I realized I hadn't felt that way in years. It wasn't long after that I realized I was too burned out to stay in my position, and needed to take some time to work on my mental health.

At the time I was lost joy of coding too but I was able to found it again. One key point was to ignore learning new tech if it was not absolutely necessary and focus just creating new things. I think it all started from Sebastian Lague's video which reminded how beautiful coding can be. [ https://youtu.be/X-iSQQgOd1A?si=aqriiWmcqqphOiuI ]

Hear hear! >It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. This cannot be overstated

Same! It reminded me of a story about the latest Phrack issue called "Calling All Hackers" [1] and made me hopeful that indeed the hacker spirit is still present in the younger generation and will always be, as long as we older folks encourage it instead of trying to hammer it down. Makes me remember the times I was a teen and I was writing code because I wanted to, not because I needed to. Sometimes I used these skills for good, other times for stupid crap like hacking the "competition" and I'm ashamed of this, but all in all this experience made me who I am today and I'm grateful that I had it. And I'm happy the next generation is still finding joy in coding. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306128

“I program like we programmed 15 years ago” told me once my friend and engineer which I consider one of the best graphics programmers around: his projects are fast, beautiful and innovative.

> think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. This is a lovely phrase. Is it an idiom or your own creation?

Sometimes it's good to just step away and do something random. Do Advent of Code but non-competitively, just make it work in a random language without following best practices. Pick up pico-8 and write a crappy game or script with two-lettered variables because you don't have the space or arsedness for longDescriptiveVariableNames. Play games like TIS-100 or Shenzen I/O, making sure to print out the manuals and put them in the oldest folder you can find, and / or spill coffee on it.

Every time I want to have that good old feeling, I create three files in a new directory on my home server: index.php, index.css, index.js :) I would have done everything in Perl for maximum creativeness but didn't have the time to bring myself up to date with the current version.