published on 07 October 2021
I always feel bad when I look at my GitHub contributions graph, it's so empty. A year ago it was so much greener, more green squares, less white ones. I don't even know why I am bummed by this, heck, I'm not even comparing myself to other GitHub users. I just think there could be more.
It's not like I haven't had fun the last few months when I was coding (or pushing to GitHub, for that matter) less. I did a lot of things, new things, old things, wasted time, the usual amount, not too much or too little.
And it's not like I stopped liking programming, staring at compiler errors far after midnight, it's frustrating, but it's also fun... in a way.
It's just that I haven't had anything I was really motivated to code, all the previous things I made and still use today, work, they're finished, I haven't noticed any bugs, and they run just fine. I guess I'm pragmatic like that, if I don't need a new tool to do something for me, I'm not really motivated to make something, I lose interest.
If it already exists, why should I make another one? For example, I have an SDL2 snake clone whose first commit was in December 2019. It's still not finished and probably never will be and that's fine. Even as a learning project, I didn't really care about it and made frequent month long breaks, whenever I hit some sort of roadblock. I wasn't motivated to continue, because there are already lots of snake clones out there and why should mine matter. Also, it neither made my life easier by automating something nor was it a useful tool. So I dropped it, plenty of times, to work on something that scrapes a website and turns that into an RSS feed, for example.
In short, I don't feel bad for not writing more code, I'm just annoyed by all the whites squares in my contributions graph.