@Madgarden sure thing!

so for recovering from burnout... the best thing to do is literally avoid all programming for as long as you can, via long vacation or working exclusively on other things. but avoiding programming is more than just programming -- I've found that you need to avoid general problem solving and/or anything that makes heavy use of your brain.

I spent a few months doing nothing but building plastic models, and found it pretty helpful.

@Madgarden for more general programmers block, I found myself running up against it very very hard in the past few years, mostly because I found myself in a novel position of not just implicitly knowing how to solve every programming problem, because i was working on very different things than I'd done for the 20 years previous.

What I ended up learning to do was long before ever touching code, breaking down the problem as much as I could, do the point of almost atomic individual steps

@Madgarden I would effectively say "what is my big goal?" and write that down, and then write down the big steps to get there, and then look at those big steps and say "what specifically do I have to do in order to finish this?"

And then when I was done I effectively had a checklist/roadmap I could follow very closely while programming without having to worry about big picture stuff. It also let me feel a good sense of accomplishment for tiny tasks, which were in service to the big ones.

@Madgarden this was extremely helpful at work, but it was also helpful for my side projects where I would often flame out as soon as I hit a big problem.

These days I can look at a big problem and rather than stalling because I am like "I don't know how to build a full need based AI system" I can just say "okay, I need this tiny piece first, then this, then this" and then suddenly it's working.