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I know what you mean. I am a single founder for half of my projects, and for the other half I'm the sole coder in a virtual office. In both cases, the situatio

I know what you mean. I am a single founder for half of my projects, and for the other half I'm the sole coder in a virtual office. In both cases, the situation is the same: I'm coding by myself in my house. One solution I've found for the boredom is to switch between projects when you get bored, or work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project. Another is to just get out of the house. I usually go out for lunch. And I've been trying to go to local startup events, including a monthly hackathon I created for that very purpose. A third is of course to get a face to face co-founder (at least for some of the time), or to move your working environment to a shared space with other startups. I haven't taken the latter step mainly because I live pretty far from startup central in Philly and I don't want to pay for office space.

randallsquared 19y ago
I haven't found a solution to boredom. That said, as someone who's been programming at home for years, knowing that I was going to go out at lunch would destroy much of the benefit of working at home. In order to start work in earnest, it's important for me to feel that I won't have any interruptions indefinitely. Today, for example, I'm expecting to go to dinner, and here it is before 2pm, and I'm reading news.yc instead of working, because it's really hard to start working when "I know I'll just have to stop", in spite of also knowing that I could get a lot done before then. Nevermind, I guess this is just a personal failing. :)
- epi0Bauqu 19y ago
  It's probably more like my personal failing :) I work great for a few hours at a time, but then I need an extended break. My best hours are in the morning. So I usually work from around 8am to 11:30-noon, and then go out to lunch. Granted, sometimes I don't do that and work through lunch at home and go out to dinner instead. But often, I need a break about then. I usually read the papers (WSJ and local) during lunch, and then when I come home I'm up for a few more hours of work before dinner.
- cstejerean 19y ago
  I have the same problem. Knowing there is something I have to do in X hours makes it harder fore to even start doing work. The solution for me is to have flexibility. This means I sometimes forget to eat or forget to sleep.
nostrademons 19y ago
"work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project." I've found this helps me a lot. When I was first starting out, I found boredom to be a real problem, because there were only so many things that I could do productively on my project. If I didn't have the storage backend done, I had to work on that, because otherwise there was nothing that'd have a concrete effect. Same with the basic UI skeleton - it needed to be done before anything else in the UI was useful, so if I didn't want to work on it, tough. Now there are many more potential "attachment points" to the project, and it's easier to find something interesting to do. If I don't want to work on this UI widget, I can find another UI widget that needs doing. If I don't want to do UI at all, I can work on the backend or runtime libs. If I get really desperate, there's always things that need to be refactored or tested further or documented.

randallsquared 19y ago

I haven't found a solution to boredom. That said, as someone who's been programming at home for years, knowing that I was going to go out at lunch would destroy much of the benefit of working at home. In order to start work in earnest, it's important for me to feel that I won't have any interruptions indefinitely. Today, for example, I'm expecting to go to dinner, and here it is before 2pm, and I'm reading news.yc instead of working, because it's really hard to start working when "I know I'll just have to stop", in spite of also knowing that I could get a lot done before then. Nevermind, I guess this is just a personal failing. :)

epi0Bauqu 19y ago
It's probably more like my personal failing :) I work great for a few hours at a time, but then I need an extended break. My best hours are in the morning. So I usually work from around 8am to 11:30-noon, and then go out to lunch. Granted, sometimes I don't do that and work through lunch at home and go out to dinner instead. But often, I need a break about then. I usually read the papers (WSJ and local) during lunch, and then when I come home I'm up for a few more hours of work before dinner.
cstejerean 19y ago
I have the same problem. Knowing there is something I have to do in X hours makes it harder fore to even start doing work. The solution for me is to have flexibility. This means I sometimes forget to eat or forget to sleep.

nostrademons 19y ago

"work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project." I've found this helps me a lot. When I was first starting out, I found boredom to be a real problem, because there were only so many things that I could do productively on my project. If I didn't have the storage backend done, I had to work on that, because otherwise there was nothing that'd have a concrete effect. Same with the basic UI skeleton - it needed to be done before anything else in the UI was useful, so if I didn't want to work on it, tough. Now there are many more potential "attachment points" to the project, and it's easier to find something interesting to do. If I don't want to work on this UI widget, I can find another UI widget that needs doing. If I don't want to do UI at all, I can work on the backend or runtime libs. If I get really desperate, there's always things that need to be refactored or tested further or documented.