Thread: I keep GIVNG UP!!!

I have had similar experiences as well.

It doesn't help that I am incapable of working on projects in small steps over time. I have a poor memory and general lack of focus, so each time I resume a project in this fashion, I spend much of that time just getting back up to speed. Also, having so many interests makes it easy for me to fall off a project, as it just slips my mind. That's why I normally thrive on working for many consecutive hours, to get as far as possible before I stop. Of course, since I no longer have many consecutive hours to work single-mindedly on a project, I can't even do this anymore.

I find that, for me, comfort is a luxury that is a bane to productivity. If I do have several "open" hours at home to work on a project, I usually end up letting myself get distracted. A good way around this is to go somewhere else - without the comfort of your living space, it might be easier to focus on what you actually want to accomplish.

Thank goodness libraries are still around. The general silence and academic atmosphere make it a great place to sit and focus on pursuits such as programming.

Before I started programming at work, it was only the sheer enjoyment of the craft that kept me programming as a hobby. Like you mentioned, I probably went through my introductory text five or six times over the course of ten years, always stopping for long stretches and getting back into it. Each time I did, however, I could do a little bit more.

Perhaps you need to conceive a project that makes you excited. Imagine you booked a trip to an exotic location that you've always wanted to go. You'd probably be thinking about it a lot up to the time you go, because you'd be excited about it. The same goes for projects - if you're excited enough about it, your brain won't let you forget about it.

Along these lines, you should also have goals in mind. Without clear goals, it can feel like you're just dickering around killing time, even if you're being generally productive. Specific goals can help keep you focused and motivated.

For me, it's not a matter of giving up, but of achieving my objectives, and then not having any new objectives.When I was learning C, my objective was to create a program that could download pictures from galleries automatically, instead of me having to manually view each picture and then saving them to the computer. We're talking about hundreds of pics per gallery, and that would have taken days to manually save the pics from each gallery. Once I succeeded in this objective, I had no more objectives, and so I stopped programming in C, and eventually forgot everything that I had learned.

So then I switched to Visual Basic .NET to create some software that I wanted to use on my Windows machines. Once I completed a piece of software, I would stop learning VB.NET, and eventually forgot everything that I had learned. And then when I wanted to write new software, I had to relearn everything from scratch. And it happens over and over again.

I have the time, and the intelligence to learn any programming language, but only for the purpose of writing a specific piece of software. Once done, my use for the language stops, and I regress back to almost zero knowledge.

I suspect that many hobbyist programmers like myself are trapped in this cycle. Use it or lose it, as the adage goes.