Go off into the woods, literally or not. I went back to my parents house for a year and that's how long it took to overcome my burnout. Life is finally starting to feel exciting again.
I'm now exploring spirituality outside of religion for the first time. It's helped greatly with the anxiety and existential dread.
The best thing I ever did for my hands was putting ctrl to the left of the spacebar where alt usually is. I hit it with my left thumb. I never have to contort my wrists. And it works across all programs, not just vim/emacs. Capslock is still using the pinky.
I also switched to Dvorak and put backspace on Capslock, which I think also helped but might be diminishing returns. But I still really like ctrl on alt for my single best ergonomics tweak.
David - we often use the phrase "code when you need it and no code when you don't." obviously that is easier said than done but we do see tremendous power in a platform that allows you to write a small amount of arbitrary code while having access to an entire registry of thousands of pre-built integrations.
Congrats on the 2.0 release! Python support and the key/value store is super cool to see.
Recently used Pipedream very successfully on a freelance gig to create a search widget powered by a client-editable Airtable base that auto-feeds into an Algolia index.
I'm excited to play around with v2, have been promoting Pipedream in my little Discord community of scrappy devs. Best wishes on your continued success.
@davidfactorial - thanks for sharing your use case and we look forward to hearing your feedback on the 2.0 release with Python support. we continue to be amazed but how many users are building automations with Discord and we appreciate your sharing the product with your scrappy dev community!
I relate to this a lot, having also started and then not finished a lot of games like the author.
Perhaps it seems obvious to say, but I have only recently fully internalized that making games is not the same activity as playing games, and that it will take many orders of magnitude more time to polish even one gameplay feature compared to how long it will take for that gameplay feature to become stale _to me_ as the dev playtesting that feature over and over again.
I wonder if a lot of gamedevs just get tired of playing their own game and thus don't care about it anymore as a result?
Seth Godin has a book called The Dip about the slog in the middle that many creative projects have (business starting as well). I wonder if gamedev has a particularly nasty dip and that is why so few finish.
> I wonder if a lot of gamedevs just get tired of playing their own game and thus don't care about it anymore as a result?
FWIW, if you work on large enough projects, you probably aren't playing the game that much at all unless you're a gameplay programmer (and even then, you might only play the small fraction of the game that your feature touches). I do graphics/engine programming for games and the closest I get to playing the game is "load into level, teleport to position X, use a cheat code to give me item Y, use Y, see rendering bug"
I've joked on some projects that I'm excited for the game to ship so I can learn how to play.
I usually take the Friday + Monday off of Ludum Dare, and I block out the entire weekend for the event. Turns out, making space for gamedev makes me make games.
I'm a large fan of Django/Python for anything CRUD-like.
It has been my go-to web framework for the better part of a decade and I continue to be impressed with it. "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines" tagline is quite apt, as it has the highest combo of power and developer efficiency of any framework I've come across even today.
It is Python, which gives you the entirety of the Python ecosystem including all of the data science stuff and a bunch of Django-specific extras if you need them.
With the recent crop of Javascript-less tools like HTMX and AlpineJS you can do most things without any Javascript at all. Bootstrap or Tailwind both work great for CSS.
I still find the database ORM to be one of the most pleasant ways to interface with a datastore, and the migrations system usually makes database changes pretty easy. Can work with Postgres, Sqlite, mySql and a few others.
It has basically zero external dependencies besides one or two tiny ones.
I've been pleased with how easy it has been to keep Django upgraded. It feels like relatively little has changed in a backwards incompatible way compared to some of the frontend churn I've experienced.
It's widely used, and so it is relatively easy to find people who can work on a Django codebase compared to something more obscure. Django embraces convention over configuration, so if you've worked on one Django codebase you can probably work on another.
The documentation is excellent, and since it is widespread there is a huge amount of learning materials, articles, and Stackoverflow questions around.
Django has 16 years worth of work put into it and is extremely well tested. It implements a lot of the security things I have no interest in trying myself, like password hashing, sanitizing, etc.
Unless your requirements call for extreme performance needs or massively big data, Django can probably handle your workload just fine.
You can get pretty far with the base framework, and then if you need something else, consult the massive list of extras: https://awesomedjango.org/
Nice to have this person's high level thoughts all spelled out.