I don't know if I've been burned out that bad, but for me, making something where I can get lots of quick, visible feedback helps a lot.
The quick part is important you have to convince yourself to keep going, and if you have long stretches between seeing something new, it's really difficult.
The visible part is important, because once you've reached a certain point, you'll want to show it off to people. It doesn't really matter what they think of it because once you're at the point of showing it off, you've already given yourself a big ego boost.
Data visualizations and games work well for this. Game engines and CRUD apps do not.
Data visualization sounds like something I could do at work! Working on an enterprise visualization/reporting program now for an internship. Could you guys give me some pointers with getting more development-oriented tasks during code sprint planning?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the glorified Facebook like-clicker type of tester -- the tests are automated at least. I will be finishing my introductory project this week and will be starting sprints with the rest of the scrum team. I have been in a couple sprint planning session but haven't been able to participate yet and will have my first chance to take my first real project. The other intern on my team who's been here longer than me is still doing mainly writing tests with this really outdated Keyword model. I've been doing the same and it's not fun.
My question to you is, as a new intern to the team (this is my first 'real' development job), should I try and aim for getting some dev work? I'm afraid it might tick off a couple of the more senior devs. I'm not against doing test work--I'm watching James Shore's TDJS I know it's important--, but I would rather work with newer technologies than some Java monstrosity written pre-AWT.[0][1][2]
[0] www.letscodejavascript.com
[1] At least it's not written in ABAP like some of our other programs. shudder*
[2]Not sure if I'm doing HN-style citations correctly.
The quick part is important you have to convince yourself to keep going, and if you have long stretches between seeing something new, it's really difficult.
The visible part is important, because once you've reached a certain point, you'll want to show it off to people. It doesn't really matter what they think of it because once you're at the point of showing it off, you've already given yourself a big ego boost.
Data visualizations and games work well for this. Game engines and CRUD apps do not.