I'm guessing I'm a similar age to the author from the reference to parents shouting at the phone bill from my 1200/75 modem running all night. And just recently I've felt exactly the same way. My job involves both running systems and writing software, and the joy has disappeared from both. I used to work all day, then come home and hack all evening, but now I don't know if I'm burnt out, but I can find no interest in making computers do cool things any more.
There's been one small bright spot - I tried learning Haskell and loved the way functional programming stretched my brain but there's an awful lot to learn to do anything useful. But Elm, wow, do I love Elm. I feel the excitement I felt when I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time ten years ago. It's finding something interesting and useful to build with Elm that I'm struggling with now.
I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise.
There's been one small bright spot - I tried learning Haskell and loved the way functional programming stretched my brain but there's an awful lot to learn to do anything useful. But Elm, wow, do I love Elm. I feel the excitement I felt when I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time ten years ago. It's finding something interesting and useful to build with Elm that I'm struggling with now.
I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise.