Programming feels like a lifestyle to me. I wake up and am thinking about what I would like to code. My bedroom wall is covered in screenshots of features from apps that I like. The constant reminder of "what feels good" when I am using something written with software intoxicates me.
While I am not currently writing much code for my job, I am still surrounded by developers who are engineering solutions to tough problems with code. Being a security security, I support people getting their code out the door without opening up holes for people to exploit.
My lunch break is a walk to a cafe where I spend some time working until the end of the day. I find the 30 minute walk through a beautiful neighborhood with trees, flowers, bushes, and a view of the mountains off in the distance to be amazing for thinking through tough coding problems I want to tackle. The promise of caffeine is a great incentive to tackle some of the hills on the walk. These days, my hands are preoccupied with a slinky and trying to pull off some crazy tricks which require an intense level of focus of elastic collisions and oscillations related to the tensile strength of the plastic coil. This whole performance, I find, drops my mind into some incredible depths of focus. Rain or shine, my senses are completely immersed in my environment while my mind gets a chance to wander freely to the interesting things it wants to figure out. Opening the door to the cafe and smelling the pressed espressos while watching people busy with their own grind makes me proud to be a part of the rhythm of the world. The buzz of the caffeine gets me through the rest of the work day and the walk home has me pumped to get my hands dirty with some code.
When I get off of work, I am laser focused on building what I had imagined when I woke up. The whole day has been figuring out the smallest possible task that I could work on during this time that will make me happy with what I have achieved with code on any given day. Ideas for apps will come and go, but being able to start and finish a task to completion and accurately determine what I am reasonably capable of completely during this limited time after work is critical.
My approach to programming during this time is focusing on "what feels good" during development. I don't really care about what I am building, I care more about being able to take what I have in my mind and have it come to life during this time after work. I study code to build my intellectual arsenal of capabilities; languages to learn why people are obsessed with them, frameworks/SDK to feel out how to communicate capabilities to others, state management for how to make the right tradeoffs when handling data.
imo, committing to shipping something is paramount. Set deadlines for yourself to publish your ideas in one way or another and do it. Show your friends, share on discord/twitter. Feedback is the only way that you will make meaningful progress in your programming journey. We write code so that we can have a general purpose machine do something for us. Maybe the feedback comes from using the code you wrote yourself, which is something that I frequently do and find immensely satisfying. I have spent a ton of time rewriting and rewriting my blog and I am blown away that it is now all just one file (save those pesky js libraries because blocknotejs is just too good of an editor...but it will be go, oh yes, it will be go). That one file is code that has been forged by trial and error of what has "felt good" to me. The best advice that I can give any developer is "become obsessed". Just go deep on something and don't look up for a while. Don't write code to feel validated, remove your ego from what you have written, just exist in the feeling of being obsessed with creating something cool and enjoy the learning process by finding small tasks that will make you happy and not keep your mind up preventing you from sleeping.