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I don’t know about other programmers, but I find myself in two stages quite randomly.

1 – I love programming. It’s the stage where I feel like the world can change with my lines of code. The stage where I say, “Wow, this is cool, I can automate this because I know programming, let me quickly write a program.” When I’m in this stage, I often dive deep into the things I do, often losing track of time, and everything is perfect.

2 – I want a farm! I believe every programmer’s dream is to buy a farm and retire. It’s strange because I know nothing about animals, but yes… sometimes I think, “Who even invented programming,” and I wish I were on a farm with animals. Again, it’s me, the person who does everything from the keyboard and with a script.

When I’m in the second stage, things somehow slow down, and I need a lot of motivation to write my “quota” of lines of code. I’m easily distracted by anything. For example, I go to YouTube to find a song. I see a suggested video about the International Space Station. I click on it. I watch the clip for 2 minutes. I close the clip and search for the song again, but when I’m about to type something in the search box… I search for a random video about farms or some completely random topic. I fall into a black hole and learn all sorts of things, only to eventually remember what I originally wanted to do.

Or, still in the second stage, as an example from my field: I’m working on a new feature for work. I encounter a strange error. Even though I could change the code in a different way to get rid of the error, I delve deeper into the source code to understand why what I want to do isn’t working. I enter a Google -> ChatGPT -> StackOverflow -> Github Issues spiral. Most of the time, I manage to achieve what I want, but sometimes, after a lot of “research,” I go back to the simple solution of changing the code and moving on. Somehow, simple is more, I choose the simpler code but feel “pushed from behind” to do it.

Now… I don’t know how many programmer readers we have, but I’m curious… where would you buy a farm, and what animals would you keep? 😂