This. I used to spend 8+ hours a day coding (yes really) for work then ‘fun’. I often had a hard time around people in real life. It was like my nerves were on high gear and I was awkward and didn’t know when to engage the speech portion of my brain for normal conversation as if I was some observer. After not coding for a decade it’s much better. I can carry a conversation, especially after a beer.

Oh wow that really hits home. What did you switch into? Less technical role or left Software/tech altogether?

Slow migration that just happened over time. I took an architect role that required technical knowledge but about 0% coding. Initially I was disappointed about that but went with it. Eventually I took a pure business role. Along the way I got better with people, still a bit of an introvert but able to fake my way through to an executive role.

Every once in a while I’ll try to code something. I’m able to get by if I want. I get bored with it quick though and it doesn’t bring me the same kind of flow buzz mental stimulation it used to.

I’ve gotta say though, the modern web wtf happened?

React and JSX happened.

Out of curiosity what job did you move to? I'm in almost the exact same boat, extended periods of time working on code lead to an odd mental state.

I am still trapped in the developer role and I don't really see the way out at the moment, but I hate it. I don't program privately at all anymore and I do my best to take on tasks at work that require no programming. If there are straight programming tasks, I just take as much rest as I need, which can be, relative to my normal fulltime working hours, a lot. I have become efficient enough to perform adequately even when doing that.

I've found this too. When I'm knee-deep in code, my brain gets locked into "problem mode" and it can't recompose itself for communicating with others like a normal human being.

I need a good 2-3 hours away from the problem before my brain relaxes and I can actually talk without sounding like I'm stoned or mildly autistic.

Interesting use of quotations, any reason?

It looks like a German username. I’m Dutch: „It’s quite common to quote like this.”

It’s only really for citations, not ‘scare quotes’.

Their closing quotes look inverted though.

It's not quite clear from your last sentence but in any case, for German these „quotation marks“ are completely correct. For printed texts, I personally prefer the »guillemets« variant, they look more even and symmetrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German

Not that you asked, but the «French style» of guillemets is my favourite way to wrap a quotation out of all of them. Unicode has rather too many "quotemarks" and they all sort of run together. The German style of using them strikes me as aesthetically perverse, like the sentence is being pinched, or like a language which uses }braces like this{ !

Little typography nitpicking: the content inside the French quotes is supposed to be separated from the quote symbols by a (non-breaking) space, « like this ».

Interesting different aesthetical preferences voiced in this thread. :-)

As others already said, the French actually use the guillemets with thin spaces but the Swiss use them without.

But the outward pointing of the guillemets looks really odd to me. I like that the inward pointing guillemets basically scream "look at me, I'm a quoted part!".

Real « French style » puts spaces inside (they should be thin spaces).

Yes I am living in the German speaking area, but I have no idea why my browser produced smart quotes when I wrote my original text. Maybe I wrote it in another editor.

I didn't know there was “ AND ”. I hate those fancy/smart quotes. They are not internationally understood and confuse computers and people alike. Just like I wish we would all just speak English, I wish we would all just use """".

Do you mean semantically? I quoted "fun", because it wasn't fun. Diving deep into programming means letting a very specific part of your brain run rampant. The problem solving core of whatever. This hurts all other parts of your brain: especially those for movement and social stuff. I quoted "thinking in code" because it's a meme phrase created by a boy that writes hello world apps and got interviewed on TV -people online use it to make fun of "fake programmers". In the German area we use quotes around words or short phrases to make clear, that we don't mean what we just said. One can also do air quotes. Is that not done in the English speaking world?

Or do you mean the characters? Yes, I am indeed living in the German area and software here often uses those stupid, stupid "smart quotes". I believe we are also taught to write like that on paper. One opens, one closes the quoted phrase. Though I have no idea how this happened here, as right now, in Chrome, I can only produce "normal" quotes. """"