i wanna have fun programming again

I feel this. My approach has been to drop programming as a hobby honestly. I've learned to work on my car, did a kitchen remodel, took dancing classes... fucking anything where I don't have to look at a screen really.

Yeah, same here. I spend all day at a computer, last thing I want to do is spend more time at a computer. I've also spent more time working on my own vehicle's, and just generally being outside more often.

One thing that I do enjoy from time to time is graphics/game programming. Nothing really ever results from any of my projects, but it is something I enjoy, as i don't do graphics programming at my job... It's usually systems/web development, so the difference in the type of projects I choose to do as hobby programming has helped for me.
i have been taking a glassblowing class thats honestly been super fun... i just cant help but miss the enjoyment i used to have for computers lol its just kinda sad for some reason.
- Honestly I'd suggest something that gets you out of the house more. Motorcycles, Latin dance, hiking and drinking is what I do for fun. I do enjoy programming for fun sometimes but the inspiration is something you have to find in other areas of life.
- I think it's because they used to be exciting and mysterious, now they are just tedious and terrifying.
This, I always told my juniors to not rein in their hobby for writing code in their spare time. I saw too many people get burnt out and then get stuck on their career just doing the bare minimum to not get fired. Although it can be a plus for some people.
- It doest help that I work for [big corp], where the talented are poached and the remainder stick around for the swag.

Game mods and Advent Of Code did it for me.

I did a small RimWorld mod and a parser for NoManSky internal format.

Creating both of them was a blast. I had fun doing programming stuff again.

Advent Of Code allowed me to try different languages in a small bursts of the different problems. Somehow I really like this format.

I like to just tackle little things using technologies I haven't used before. Write a small application in a new language to do something simple, and keep the project small in scale. You get the satisfaction of building something and of learning a new skill, with no pressure, and you get to know whether you like the language or framework. It doesn't matter if it doesn't do anything groundbreaking or clever, and doing this just keeps your wheels turning while carving out a little bit of creative computing space for yourself, not your employer.

Also consider open-source software you use daily (because that will motivate you) and check out their repos to see if you feel like starting to get involved.

Or bite off something completely different in tech, like robotics or electronic musical instruments.

And if you're just tired of tech, that's fine and you may just need a contrasting activity you can do at home. Then at least your work doesn't become your life.

I ran into the same thing and started missing coding so I started doing projects here and there for fun. I’d agree, don’t take on any large projects or it starts to get stressful. At least at first. This was a pretty fun one for me: try to recreate the Game of Life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

Use opensource software. Once you start discovering bugs that you can fix, it might start being fun again?

Scratch your own itch. Work on a tool that YOU will enjoy using.

Userscripts are tiny and make the web better for you and others. Downside: Javascript. It's not awful, but hoo boy, it is not great.

Itch.io game jams are nice little doses of panic for creative output. I tend to go for low-end systems because on some level I'm still offended there weren't more pseudo-3D games on 8- and 16-bit hardware. Downside: if you're not using bare-metal C, it's because you're using assembly.

I recommend the Game Boy family. GB/C has a lovely compiler in GBDK and the hardware is hilariously forgiving. GBA supports C++, somehow, and is basically a modern ARM device with the worst specs imaginable. But it'll do any 2D bullshit you can imagine, no sweat, and there's bitmap modes if you insist on 3D the hard way.

DOS is also weirdly flexible, and Open Watcom will cross-compile from everywhere. Try to make anything good-looking on MDA / Hercules cards and a 4.77 MHz 8088. Do some voxel heightmaps on 386 and CGA. Thumb your nose at Windows 95 and do fancy lighting in software VGA. Some maniac out there is gonna run it on real hardware.

I have three broadly-applicable and closely-related mantras from game jams:

Always be shipping. Achieve minimum viable product as soon as possible, so all future work is tweaking. Tweaking is easy. Tweaking can go until the last minute, and is easy to shrug off if it doesn't work. Implementing a pause function will humble you if you put it off.
Different ideas go in the next project. You want this overhead title to be third-person? Well, cut that shit out, and make a note for next time. Don't Daikatana yourself.
Failure is an option. It is perfectly okay to pull the chute and admit things won't come together in the next, oh, twelve hours. It's just a game. You're just doing it for yourself. And if you give a shit beyond whatever contest you wanted to submit for, you can just keep working on it, later.

None of this is stress-free. But it's the kind you control, with more reward than punishment. And it's not a high-stakes zero-sum game about who can take the most adderall.

Self hosting a bunch of shit makes me feel like I'm really sticking it to the man

I too stick it to the man by buying a load of hard drives from him!

Uh...

Switch your stack. Try mobile or embedded development. Or dive into system programming. Something that is interesting for you but what you did not try before.

If you want to have some fun again, maybe program a little with artsy-fartsy shaders.

Make a little blog that showcases them and write a little animation everyday - or twice a week.

I've seen also "shadplay" which lets you easily write and run shaders using rust. There was also this other tool where people could live-code shaders, but I forgot the name

Infinite respect to those who know the deep magic of shader programming
- Programmers discover shaders and shout "this is how computers should've been the whole time!" Then we spend twelve hours trying to turn a circle right-side-up.
  
  Artists discover shaders and cry. Then they whip out some gorgeous speckled surface with fractal detail and we go "How the fuck?" and they say "I don't know."
Also check out creative coding which is pretty similar to shaders, but has a lower entry barrier IMO
- I used to do a ton with Processing and P5. This guy https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain did wonders for my skill and enjoyment a few years ago. I owe him a lot

I find embedded stuff fun.

Here's a single line of code, and it has distinct outcomes you can see, without 48 layers of abstractions and guardrails.

what kind of projects or whatever can i do to have fun again without feeling stressed.

Write programs that scratch your own itch.
write bots for communities you care about.
write userscripts/browserextentions
do programming/hacking challenges

(for stuff that is always online, like a bot, or a webservice, I recommend getting a dedicated computer, like a raspberry pi or a small vps)

also some general recommendation

keep you goals small and tangible. If a thing takes more than one sitting to complete, it will add to your stress when you add the remainder to your todo list.
do the simplest thing, that could possibly work.
when doing new stuff, use chatgpt to come up with a plan/boilerplate/demo/2nd opinion.

from personal experience: before I went to college, I had lots of fun doing programming challenges. During college I lost all interest in programming. At my first real job, I regained my love for programming, when I started programming things, that actual people need to improve their daily work. Since then I enjoy programming for work, as well as in my free time.

Interesting how college ruined your love for programming and work got it back. For me it's almost the complete opposite. Studying Computer Science constantly fed me with new interesting ideas, and I still had more time to play around with those ideas. At work I'm just implementing some button or some boring logic 40 hours a week and after that I'm too drained to explore any of my (many) ideas further.

I guess it's a difference in incentive. I don't care whether anyone will use what I wrote, I just want to learn something new and explore ideas.
- Interesting how college ruined your love for programming
  
  it was probably the general pressure and depression.
  
  and work got it back
  
  the costumers and the colleague were nice people. I enjoyed solving actual real-life problems.
  
  Studying Computer Science constantly fed me with new interesting ideas, and I still had more time to play around with those ideas.
  
  after my first job, I went back to college (uni?) to get my masters. There I had lots of fun implementing some of the theoretical stuff.

I found FinTech soul sucking.

The technology is cool, but most of the people I encountered in management were assholes.

i have had nothing but gen ai dick sucking and fake ass laughing shoved down my throat by these stupid ass higher ups for the past 6 months ive been here lmfao

What is your programming language? Build something for yourself, you'll feel good. May be some todo list script, may be some youtube new video notification script, you get the idea. The fun in programming is making the machine do what you want, and it helps if you actually want it.

I've made something that's both fun and challenging: https://cyb.farm

It's a tech adventure featuring many challenges about computer science stuff (crypto, stegano, protocols, development, ...). It starts on the 31^st of October, and will probably can keep you busy for a few weeks ^^

Honestly, I don't think more of the same is going to help you feel less burned out. Obviously your couple of sentences doesn't give me a lot of insight into your life, but you do not seem to enjoy your job, and that is going to color your whole perception on anything related to it. I think I'd honestly recommend you start looking for work you actually enjoy, but if that isn't possible I recommend unplugging as much as possible for awhile. That's the only way I've ever had the spark come back for me. Starting side projects always lose their luster after a session or two and just started to feel like another source of stress for me.

Fintech can take on the high stress culture of the financial world where you're expected to just accept that money will make up for the ever increasing pressure to work more and harder to "win". There's a reason Wall Street is infamously known for cocaine

All that to say, I think your approach is better than what's being suggested by others here.

Speaking from experience, become a system administrator or cyber security engineer and program as a hobby.

I went to school for software engineering then found out near the end that coding all day sucked.

LOL I went to school for cyber security and got into full stack web dev (graduated at the start of COVID, the job market sucked and I had a connection). Not gonna lie I enjoy where I’m at now. I’m a Linux nerd and I enjoy the cyber stuff but there’s no way I’m ever gonna stop smoking weed to get a security clearance or be on call as a sysadmin
- i HATE web dev lmfao, good on u!! is it really that common for sysadmin to have regular drug testing??
I did the same, sysadmin. Coding for work kills all passion. I still have to do it from time to time but it's not nearly as bad as being a full time programmer.
im actually kinda interested in security and am thinking abt getting a comptia security+ cert whats the day to day been like? same with sysadmin i truly know nothing ab that kind of role
- You make sure everything is backed up, up to date and secured, you diagnose hardware issues, to a degree - you diagnose software too.
  
  Best part is that it's engineering, not creative. If the software problem is hard, you open a support ticket with the vendor. If it's hardware, you replace it. There's no solving hard problems of thread concurrency (or whatever feels hard to you) under time pressure.
- Cybersec is so insanely broad you could do a different job every five years for the rest of your career. Or one job for 20 years like me, despite being easily bored, because every new project is different and there's always new technologies to learn. And you probably have job security for a while yet especially if you are good. For most roles, I doubt AI will replace a decent cybersec person for several years, though it may be a force multiplier.
  
  I haven't done sysadmin in a long time and the field has had more than a few major paradigm shifts: from bare metal to virtual, virtual to container, devops, software defined everything and host as cattle not pets.
  
  Back in the day it was a mix of projects and schedules and emergencies. In other words every day was different and a bit unpredictable. It may be more boring with modern approaches and technologies to significantly improve uptime.

First off, chill for a bit.

Once you've had a bit of a break, pursue your own objectives

I've been doing AdventOfCode puzzles lately. Also hacking is pretty fun and teaches a lot about programs and tools out there. Do it ethically though, on platforms like HackTheBox or HackThisSite.

ML/AI. Everything else has been eaten by agile/product owners/MBAs/micromanagement. Luckily those people still don't understand AI... And AI is still stochastic, pi planning and burnout charts don't work.

If agile bites your ass... Run away, you are too young for wasting your life

data seems fun but i cant stand most of the corporate discourse around gen ai rn. maybe ill look into some other parts of the data sphere
- ML/AI is a huge field. If you don't like 1 side of it, there are millions others.

Depends on what made you lose enjoyment and what gave you enjoyment before.

ooo ill do some thinkin on this, good point!

Yeah I've definitely reached that burnout before! I had to take a bit of time out of coding in general. I would suggest doing something different that doesn't involve a computer screen like some of the suggestions here. Things like maybe hiking or bird watching. I'm sure there's a bunch of local organizations that are available for you to find that involves outdoor recreation.

If you want to combat that burnout with coding still, maybe try learning something different from what you're used to, like game dev.

Don't program (as much). Point yourself towards DevOps, SRE, and/or Platform Engineering. You'll be designing complex systems and will have your hands in dozens of different tech stacks.

Sometimes I think a straight dev job would be interesting but I legitimately love the SRE space.

what goes on in SRE?
- We focus a lot more on production than the average developer. It's our job to make sure whatever devs build is run quickly, efficiently, safely, and scalably.
  
  You will work with a lot of kubernetes, Argo, terraform, Prometheus, grafana. You'll design build pipelines and software rollout strategies. You plan for zero downtime migrations and upgrades, database maintenance.. You'll have your hands in everything from capacity planning to security to cost optimization to developer support.. User permissions, infrastructure, networking, observability.. You will write RFCs and setup POCs for new tools. You define and track error budgets and figure out how to keep your org under those projections. When there is an outage you will be involved in writing post mortems.
  
  The days are so varied and unpredictable that it keeps things interesting. The landscape changes so often you're never really stuck doing the same thing over and over.
  
  I genuinely love it.
  
  EDIT: The SRE Podcast from Google is actually really great for learning about this world. The first season talks about what you'll be doing and why (based around the SRE O'Riley book). The second season talks about what to expect in different stages of your career progression.

I walked (ran!) away from the employer / employee dynamic and started a consulting company.

It's NOT easy. To achieve more than modest sustainability you need ambition and aggressive sales (or a REALLY good network, in the right part of the world).