From Tom Sawyer:

...Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

It is common in the open source world to hear that someone wrote some software to “scratch their own itch.” The implication is usually that they wrote the code to meet some need (or annoyance?) they had, and it may, by mere coincidence, be useful to others as well. Sometimes this phrase also used to excuse the software or lack of support for it. It may also be used to provide guidance for those wanting to write software: do something useful for yourself.

I think there is a considerable amount of wisdom in this approach. Nothing motivates a person like a genuine interest in a project. The best learning (in my non-scientific opinion) occurs when a person is driven by their own interest. Outside pressures can only do so much.

I often see Project Euler or some kind of “programming koans” offered up as suggestions to improve one’s programming skills. I find these to be unhelpful for me, as I cannot make myself be interested in them. In fact, I should not need to force myself to be interested at all: that pushes the activity into the “work” category and the exercise has already failed.

For programmers, we should be writing code which we want to write, solving problems we want to solve, and producing something we want to make.

Along the way, we may accidentally learn all kinds of new things, but only because those things are on the path of building our project. It is not about making something useful, or good, or desirable. It is about the joy of creation.

That does not mean it is all bunnies and sunshine, though. I have hit my head against the wall more times over software I was writing for fun than any homework problem. Why? Because they were problems I intensely desired to overcome – for myself.

The point, in case I have not beaten it to death already, is that you should write code for you. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect or won’t compile on anyone else’s machine. It doesn’t matter if twenty other programs exist that do the same thing. All that matters is that you write it. Learning is merely a side effect.