Is Programming Still Fun After 20 Years? Here’s the Honest Truth

Twenty years is a long time to be doing anything, especially writing code. But is it still fun? To answer that, we need to go back a bit.

The first line of code I ever wrote was over 2 decades ago, sitting at home after school on a PC that had less storage than the smartwatch I wear today. But at the time, it felt limitless.

And in a lot of ways, it was fantastic. No deadlines. No Jira boards. Just me, a blinking cursor, and some random Python statements that printed numbers to the screen. It was simple, but it was fun.

Fast forward two decades and millions of lines of code later, and the question I still get asked the most is: “Is programming still fun?”. Do I still enjoy the craft that kept me awake for days on end and cost most of my hair to turn white. And the answer is… kind of. Sometimes. Depends on the day. And the manager. And traffic conditions.

After 20 years, programming feels less like a playground and more like a trade. The thrill of solving a bug at 2 AM hits differently when you’ve done it 400 times. Writing a login page for the tenth time doesn’t exactly get the dopamine flowing anymore the way that it used to.

And perhaps much of that reduction in fun is due to the many new frameworks and libraries that have been created since that time. What once took days of back and forth with several people, now takes half an hour on average. And that’s discounting the latest “vibe coding” workflows.

But there are still moments in my day that I would consider to be “fun”. Like building something new from scratch, optimizing a function, patching up a security issue, seeing users actually use and engage with what you built, etc. I’m less thrilled with how something works, and more excited about if it will work period.

What’s changed most during that time isn’t the code. It’s me. My goals, my energy levels, my tolerance for unnecessary complexity. I’ve come to appreciate clarity in code the way some people appreciate fine watch. A well-structured module? A clean PR review? That’s the good stuff.

But let’s not sugarcoat it. Coding professionally is still work. A substantial amount of work. Sometimes it’s fixing silent errors at 3 PM on a Friday. Sometimes it’s sifting through logs that look like the Matrix because one dependency broke in a non-obvious way. That’s not fun. That’s the job.

And yet, here I am still writing code, still building things, and still curious. The fun hasn’t disappeared. It’s just evolved to something different.

Once you start leading teams, focusing on infrastructure and being heavily tied to the business end, things change. You spend more time in meetings than in your editor. You start thinking in timelines, budgets, and edge cases that might affect real users. Code becomes less about personal joy and more about keeping the machine running. And if you’re not careful, the thing you once loved can start to feel like overhead.

But here’s the twist, leading a team comes with its own kind of fun. Watching a junior dev push big feature to production. Seeing a product go from idea to launch. Knowing that something you architected is now handling thousands of requests per minute without falling over. It’s not the same thrill as getting your first “Hello World” to print, but it’s something deeper. A kind of earned satisfaction.

And then there are the personal projects. The ones you build without deadlines, just because you want to see if you can. That’s where the fun lives these days for me. On weekends, late nights, when I can just mess around with some code without worrying about metrics or approvals. That’s where the old spark still shows up. Though it doesn't outrank my sleep these days.

Because ultimately, the fun in programming doesn’t come from the job title. It comes from the act of creating and reasoning. Of making something work. Of turning nothing into something with just your mind and a keyboard.

So… is programming still fun after 20 years?

It can be. But it’s a different kind of fun. Less fireworks, more slow burn. It’s fun when the tools get out of the way. It’s fun when you’re in the zone, building something that actually matters. And it’s fun when you step back after a long day, look at what you’ve built, and think: “That’s mine. I made that.”

Fun isn’t constant. But it does return, usually right after the bug gets fixed, the system stabilizes, and you finally get that one idea to click.

And when it does, even after 20 years, it still feels almost just as good as decades prior.

If you’ve been coding for a while, what keeps you coming back?