Your brain is constantly trying to make itself more powerful and better oriented in your environment. It does this by seeking new and stimulating information, information that adds to your understanding of the world. As you get older, your work becomes a less and less rich source of novelty and stimulation. That means your brain doesn't engage automatically the way it used to. It refuses to allocate cycles to the problem. It reduces the mental resources you're working with to a trickle.
Like you, I'm faced with a couple of APIs that I have to understand. In my case, they are third-party SAAS APIs that I need to evaluate as integration targets for a product I work on.
The odds are very low that I'm going to learn anything of lasting technical value from these APIs. Two years from now, I will probably have to wrack my brain to remember if I ever worked with them directly or just heard about them second-hand.
The same is true of most of the programming I do, especially if I do it well. The alternative is to become one of those toxic senior developers who feel entitled to novelty at work and find ways to make simple problems technically stimulating for themselves, and simultaneously unapproachable for many of their teammates.
How do you stay engaged? You have to remember that you can always solve these problems better than you ever have before. Your solution can be more transparent, cheaper to operate, approachable for new devs, easier to hack on without breaking it, better-documented. You can challenge yourself to finish it quickly or to involve junior devs in its development in a way that is constructive to their growth.
If you don't care about making your solution better in those ways, if you only care about solving little puzzles in code, then you will get bored, because you will look at new projects and know that you can solve all the little puzzles in them, and you won't learn anything fundamentally new in the process.
Like you, I'm faced with a couple of APIs that I have to understand. In my case, they are third-party SAAS APIs that I need to evaluate as integration targets for a product I work on.
The odds are very low that I'm going to learn anything of lasting technical value from these APIs. Two years from now, I will probably have to wrack my brain to remember if I ever worked with them directly or just heard about them second-hand.
The same is true of most of the programming I do, especially if I do it well. The alternative is to become one of those toxic senior developers who feel entitled to novelty at work and find ways to make simple problems technically stimulating for themselves, and simultaneously unapproachable for many of their teammates.
How do you stay engaged? You have to remember that you can always solve these problems better than you ever have before. Your solution can be more transparent, cheaper to operate, approachable for new devs, easier to hack on without breaking it, better-documented. You can challenge yourself to finish it quickly or to involve junior devs in its development in a way that is constructive to their growth.
If you don't care about making your solution better in those ways, if you only care about solving little puzzles in code, then you will get bored, because you will look at new projects and know that you can solve all the little puzzles in them, and you won't learn anything fundamentally new in the process.