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Lack of Ability, but Yearning

January 22, 2025

I've been sorta sad lately about not doing any real programming. The problem really is that I don't have any “itches” that I could scratch by writing a new program. I've pretty much scratched them all, with e.g. gemroff and my custom site generator.

Of course, I still do have plenty of itches. Just that all of them now are completely outside of my programming ability, such as my ideal archiving software[1] or fixing bugs in… somewhere, because I don't even have the skills to debug it and find where in my computer's software stack the issue is occurring. Or really, being honest with myself, my Game Boy Advance game I really want to finish but haven't progressed beyond a prototype of.

And this isn't really me being overly self-critical or anything, I'm being as accurate as I can be when judging my own abilities. For instance, I am very confident in saying that I know the Game Boy Advance's hardware architecture much more in depth than all but a few dozen other people (i.e. people who have written actual emulators, did the original reverse-engineering, and the original designers themselves). And yet, I've never actually finished a real game for it (nor a game for anything else), because I have zero ability and zero experience in making a game. And with GBA programming being embedded programming and having some arbitrary limitations, it makes it hard if you don't already know how to architect games. In that particular case I'll probably never learn because I don't really have any game ideas that make sense on modern desktop computers where I wouldn't encounter those restrictions.

So my general problem is I don't really have any remaining small–medium scale ideas, and yet I have no experience and am even worse than the worst junior developer in terms of writing large-scale programs from scratch. And while I can contribute small fixes to preexisting large projects, I struggle to implement anything nontrivial (assuming the maintainers of the project tolerate nontrivial contributions at all, since they often understandably don't like sweeping changes made to code they're familiar with by someone else).

It's just sorta frustrating because I love programming but have nothing to actually program. I guess if I'm trying to be objective about my own shortcomings, it's not being ambitious enough to try writing a large project, even I think I won't be able to finish.

Although I suppose I have tried writing something ambitious-for-me: writing a GBA game. But I just ended up wasting thirty hours of work on a prototype with decent gameplay, but then stalling out because I can't figure out how to implement basic game things like a pause menu or unlocking levels in the level select. And even if I solved all the menu issues and things like saving, then I'd have to make actually compelling levels, and replace the placeholder art with real art that doesn't look like crap; and uggh I literally cannot imagine a future where I am ever able to complete it. And I cannot imagine me even getting a basic webapp working for my archiver idea—although that's mostly because I lack the strength of will to tolerate modern web dev tooling, rather than being unable to.

=> [1]: my ideal archiving software

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