I have realized this morning, when I was riding in the bus, that my habit of creating a new side project every 6 months, working on it for maybe 2-3 months of relatively high productivity, and suddenly losing interests afterwards (usually not finished, or not polished), probably means that programming is an addiction to me.<p>No one is using my project, and I'm not exactly learning a lot from them, except in the first half of each one because whatever afterwards is just polishing (e.g. I did an interpreter project on a Python subset a year ago, and TBH the whole concept was pretty straightforward once my brain got it in the first few weeks). It's more of an obsession and that probably explains why I got burned out after 2-3 months and COMPLETELY lost interests in it. Looking at my GitHub commit history, it is always 2-3 months of almost daily commits compensated by 3 months of absolutely non-activity.<p>I don't think this is the right path for me if I want to leverage my side projects to get a job in low-level programming. Either I figure out how to drill deeper into each of my projects, or I need to figure out how to remove the burnout every 2-3 months. If the market is good I'd go straight to apply for system programming jobs but right now it's even tough to keep my own job.<p>So this is my unpopular opinions about side project programming -- if you are like me, maybe it's time to rethink the strategy. We only have one life, and I'm already 42. Gosh! Maybe I (we) should just find another hobby.