Programming for the sake of programming gets boring after a few years. At least for me, this was the case. There is only so far you can go with it as a pure di

Programming for the sake of programming gets boring after a few years. At least for me, this was the case. There is only so far you can go with it as a pure discipline. Once you've mastered design patterns, higher order functions, etc. you end up with writing "just another" app, service, CRUD thing, etc. What I found really interesting was going one step further and using programming to solve "higher order" problems, such as data science or artificial intelligence related problems. I'm not talking about implementing something in Tensorflow. That again is just programming. I'm talking about implementing something in Tensorflow to solve a specific problem and seeing the result of that. The programming part is beside the point, it is a means to an end. I think you really need to dig deep and ask yourself why you are writing code at all. The act of writing software itself is not that intellectually stimulating once you've mastered it well enough. It is just one layer of abstraction. Think about what is the next layer of abstraction you can build on top of your programming layer.