I love this perspective. I think part of the problem is so many of us are stuck doing stuff that is far too damn complicated to be fun to build or fun to use. If you're burning out on hard stuff, do something easy for a change that puts a smile on someone's face. If you don't think you can make a cynical, stressed-out adult smile, make something that puts a smile on a kid's face - that's easy, and it's a way to remember the joy of building fun and creative things.
When I was a kid I loved computers and I saved my paper route money and bought Borland C++ and tried to learn C++ from the manual. I failed utterly and I had no one to teach me. Now kids can learn easier languages that do cooler things on cooler hardware and they have the Internet to learn from.
Great things are possible and computing has made great leaps forward. Enjoy it!
I have the luxury of a corporate job that allows me to create software applications for internal users that are much better than what they were using before - so much better that their daily enjoyment of their jobs is significantly improved. (And that says a lot more about how bad their old tools are than it says about how awesome a programmer I am.)
As challenging and frustrating as it can sometimes be for me to get the application stack working, it's nothing compared to the aggravation and sheer misery I'm eliminating from my users' workflow.
One group sits close enough to me that I can actually hear the reduction in swearing each time I replace a shitty old tool they have to use with something that was actually designed with their needs in mind. That's a pretty nice feeling.
When I was a kid I loved computers and I saved my paper route money and bought Borland C++ and tried to learn C++ from the manual. I failed utterly and I had no one to teach me. Now kids can learn easier languages that do cooler things on cooler hardware and they have the Internet to learn from.
Great things are possible and computing has made great leaps forward. Enjoy it!