Building Birdhouses

I think I rekindled my joy for programming by building birdhouses.

Before you dig into this post thinking you’ll discover how birdhouses relate to programming, I don’t mean literally building birdhouses. For some time I found myself bored with programming; I think from spending too much time doing it for a day job. My programming outside of work was inspired mainly by working on problems relating to the day job that either were boring or had lofty goals that required significant time and effort. I didn’t reach the end of many of these side projects I started because of this and often found myself losing interest as they dragged on.

Then I started building birdhouses. It occurred as a side-effect of when I had made it a goal to begin populating my GitHub and this blog with something. At the time I didn’t know with what and so I began with adding some posts to share my debugging experience or simply uploading small projects I wrote that I needed to solve some problem (like book scanning or web scraping my router). And as I did that, I found it was fun again.

And so I found myself beginning to put up birdhouses in my garden; building small little projects that are meaningless to anyone but myself and simply fun to construct and fit for a max-one-weekend project. This is what I mean by birdhouses, I am talking about the hobby of building small birdhouses for backyards or gardens with no intention of any greater goal or monetisation and despite the easy access to the mass produced birdhouses in the store. It lets me build things that are novel, challenge myself to learn new things and exercise my creativity, and be urgent enough (in order to cap the time commitment) that it does not drag on.

So maybe if you’re bored with programming, try building birdhouses for your garden.