Some thoughts about passion…

Hi there!

A couple of weeks ago, I saw something that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s not related to software development, but I think it contains a really key message, something absolutely relevant for software devs.

It’s an interview with Canadian musician Joel Zimmerman(opens in new tab), aka deadmau5. If you’re not familiar, Joel has been making electronic dance music (EDM) for 25 years. He’s enormously popular and successful.

In this interview, he says:

I don’t really enjoy dance music. I don’t partake, I don’t pump it in my car... I don’t get excited about it.

While Joel enjoys certain technical aspects of making EDM, he isn’t passionate about it. As he explains it, he threw a bunch of darts, and this was the one that stuck. Later in the interview, he talks about how he feels like he’s missed the boat on developing a skill in an area he might’ve been more passionate about, like programming.

I wanted to share this with you because I know a lot of aspiring software devs worry about whether they have enough passion to succeed as a developer. Is programming really for you if you don’t wake up on Saturday morning excited to learn about TypeScript or hack on a side project?

It’s interesting… Up until now, my mental model has been that certain career paths require a lot of passion, while others don’t require much at all. I've always pictured software development as somewhere in the middle:

I never expected an aspiring accountant to wake up Saturday morning excited to practice bookkeeping, but I did sorta expect successful musicians to have a deep well of passion about their craft.

But learning that deadmau5 has never been passionate about the music he makes has made me throw this whole mental model away. I’m not sure that passion is ever necessary, no matter the career path.

And really, when I think about the software developers I’ve worked with, very few of them have been “passionate”. Most of them treat it like any other job, like a dentist who does solid work at the office, but clocks out at the end of the day.

Now, I am one of the weird ones who wakes up on the weekend excited to code 😅. I can’t really deny that having passion has made the journey easier for me. But I think passion is one of a handful of beneficial traits, and as long as you have one or two of them, you’re good.

For example, I’d argue that discipline is more important than passion, because there’s no controlling what you’re passionate about. I actually really struggle to work on projects I’m not excited about, because I’m not particularly disciplined.

It makes me think about the people I used to teach when I worked at a local coding bootcamp. I was an instructor for their part-time program: 14 hours a week for 8 months. The part-time program tended to attract older students; I would guess that the average age was between 30 and 40. Most of these folks weren’t passionate about coding. They wanted to switch to a more lucrative career so that they could provide for their family. But they were super hard-working, often juggling the program with a full-time job and kids. And I think that served them even better than passion would have.

It also reminds me a bit of a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago: “Becoming a Software Developer Without a CS Degree”(opens in new tab). I was trying to learn how developers broke into the industry without a Computer Science degree. I got hundreds of responses, and there was no clear dominant pattern; every person leveraged their strengths in their own unique way.

It's so easy to get impostor syndrome, especially when the most visible developers online seem to have an endless amount of passion. But I can tell you, most of the (very successful!) developers I’ve known and worked with have treated it like any other job.

In other news: I'm spending my summer rebuilding my blog!

It’s been about 5 years since I published the original version of joshwcomeau.com(opens in new tab), and I think it’s time for a refresh. ✨

Cosmetically, the new blog looks quite similar to the old one, but everything is a little more refined. Under the hood, I'm migrating from the Next.js Pages router to the App router. As a consequence, I've switched from styled-components to Linaria. I've also adopted Shiki for code snippets, and made a bunch of other behind-the-scenes improvements.

When I built my original blog, I was working full-time as a software developer and teaching part-time at a coding bootcamp, so I kinda rushed some things. For example, my current blog doesn’t have a contact form, only a mailto: link. The new blog has a proper contact page, with frequently asked questions:

As another example, here’s what the mobile menu looks like on the current (old) blog:

…and here’s what it looks like on the new blog:

It wasn’t bad before, but it feels a lot more polished now. There are lots of micro-interactions, and a few new easter eggs. ✨

My goal is to finish this new blog by the end of August. Once it’s live, I’ll be spending some time writing some new posts; there are a bunch of CSS and JS stuff I want to cover, and I'm excited to have a shiny new blog to publish on. 😄

That’s all I’ve got for you today! I hope your summer is going well. ❤️