This is about programming specifically, but I guess you can experience similar things with many other activities as well. So if you can even remotely relate your thoughts are very welcome.
Alright so, every time when I sit down to programme it tends to start out great, I feel relaxed and kind of looking forward to it. However, at some point there is going to be a bug in the code or some library does not work as I expect it to. I then start googling; try something out; doesn't work; google some more; try more stuff; still doesn't work. While this is of course just what coding is like, during these "google, test, repeat" sessions I tend to go faster with every iteration and at some point I am in such a rush that it feels like I hardly remember to breathe. Needless to say that this is freaking exhausting. After an hour of this my brain is just mush.
Of course, the obvious solution to this is to just take a break as soon as I notice me speeding up. I will try to do this more, but sometimes it feels like I can't. This unsolved bug will sit in my mind so that I can't stop thinking about it even if I'm not at the keyboard. "It must be solved. Now". Of course it doesn't, but that's what my mind is telling me.
In a few months I will probably be working as a full time dev again and until then I have to have solved this problem somehow if I want to do this any longer than a couple of years.
Ideally I want programming to be a meditative experience and feel refreshed afterwards instead of completely drained. This might be illusionary, but at least I would want it to be draining more like I've been on a good run, instead of feeling like being hit by a truck.
Anyways I'm wondering if any of you can relate to this and maybe has solved this in some way. Does this ever happen to you? What do you do to prevent this from happening? I appreciate any thoughts you have on this.
I think you are making a good point. For private projects I do in fact programme a lot in go. Sometimes I even pull the plug on my router and use just devdocs.io to get things done. And this does make things at least a lot more bearable. Before I started the post graduate programme I'm currently in I did full stack development for a living in different projects. Usually Spring Boot + either vue, react or angular for frontend. And I 100% agree with you: Spring Boot is just madness. My personal arch enemy is Hibernate though. It's awesome when it works, but at some point it won't and then it is absolute hell. Problem is that where I live go jobs are scarce. Virtually everyone here is doing Spring Boot.
I've literally talked my team at work into writing an ORM rather than use Hibernate. (Ok, to be fair, the "ORM" in question doesn't do a few things that you might expect an ORM to do like creating tables and migration, and there are a few things that it does that you wouldn't expect an ORM to do, like support for data from more than just SQL databases, though we have yet to use that last feature. But it's much more "an ORM" than "not an ORM".) The in-house ORM has been in continuous use in production code working - I think - quite nicely for... jeez. Probably 7 or 8 years now?