Motivation and Self-esteem

I sometimes wonder how people keep motivated to work on projects or do certain things. I’m basically just a hobbyist software developer who’s not that well known. Motivation to do things has been the only problem for me for the past few months or even the (year).

Hilbish is my biggest project, which is just a simple shell stitched together with Lua and a sh interpreter with an API. The only reason I am keeping it updated for the most part is because I personally use Hilbish.

A lot of people make things for themselves, just put it on GitHub and make an update when they wish. I’m the same also, but it gets tiring after you don’t use it anymore but still wanna code and work on it. As an example, Ceta is a Stardew Valley mod manager. It has about 8 bug issues open and hasn’t received a feature commit for about half the year. I always feel like I want to go back to it, but I don’t want to work on it while I’m not even using it or playing Stardew Valley with mods.

In my opinion, keeping motivated ties into self-esteem a bit. If you feel like you and your projects are worth anything for people besides you then it might be a driving force to work on it, since you maybe want to keep them and talk about it or that they suggest good features and enhancements to make so you want to add those in. If you don’t have that much self-esteem, you may not feel it’s worth working on the project.

Another thing is maybe the fact of doing it by yourself (as in, sole maintainer). I haven’t minded that for the past 2 years but as of now it’s a tiny bit depressing while being stuck at home with too much free time.

I like writing code (even while not good) and creating things but I feel like I have no reason to, so having someone doing that with me will definitely give a boost in productivity. Just looking for the exact time when that can happen.