A presentation I gave last week sparked the need to reach back into personal history and ask when I first programmed a computer. That would be high school. On an HP 9320 using HP Educational Basic and an optical card reader. The cards looked like this:
What occurred to me was that in the early days - before persistent storage like cassette tapes, floppy disks, and hard drives - a software developer could actually hold a program in their hands. Much like a woodworker or a glass blower or a baker or a candlestick maker, we could actually show something to friends and family! Woe to the student who literally dropped their program in the hallway.
Then that went away. Keyboards soaked up our coding thoughts and stored them in places impossible to see. We could only tell people about what we had created, often using lots of hand waving and so much jargon that it undoubtedly must have seemed as if we were speaking a foreign language or retelling a fish-that-got-away story. "I had to parse a data file THIIIIIIIIIS BIG using nothing but Python as an ETL tool!"
Yawn.
This is at the heart of what burned me out on writing code as a profession. There was no longer anything satisfying about it. At least, not in the way one gets satisfaction from working with wood or clay or fabric or cooking ingredients. The first time I created a predictive inventory control algorithm was a lot of fun and satisfying. But there were only 4-5 people on the planet who could appreciate what I'd done and since it was proprietary, I couldn't share it. And just how many JavaScript-based menu systems can you write before the challenge becomes a task and eventually a tedious chore.
Way bigger yawn.
I've since found my way back into coding. A little. Python, several JavaScript libraries, and SQL are where I spend most of my time. What I code is what serves me. Tools for my use only. Tools that free up my time or help me achieve greater things in other areas of my life.
I can compare this to woodworking. (Something I very much enjoy and from which I derive a great deal of satisfaction.) If I'm making something for someone else, I put in extra effort to make it beautiful and functional. To do that, I may need to make a number of tools to support the effort - saw fences, jigs, and clamps. These hand-made tools certainly don't look very pretty. They may not even be distinguishable from scrap wood to anybody but myself. But they do a great job of helping me achieve greater things. Things I can actually show and touch. And if the power goes down in the neighborhood, they'll still be there when the lights come back on.