after a grueling 4 years of school and a bit of time at a fintech company ive lost almost all the enjoyment i once had for computers in high school. what kind of projects or whatever can i do to have fun again without feeling stressed.
edit: thanks everyone for such creative suggestions!! anything else on the internets just like build a trivia game teehee but yall put real thought into this shit, thank you!!
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.