!Rant but a question :)

So, I'm in college learning software engineering and kind of don't see the point of try-harding. I have always been very good at learning so I only started studying late high-school because grades were important for collage entrance. But now that I'm here and my grades have all been very good (15/20 in the worst cases), I'm not motivated to go the mile further, specially because I don't have friends to compete with (or enemies for that matter :P).

How do you developers motivate yourselves?

I look at software developement as continuous learning. You can't know every paradigm, every lanaguage, every library for all those lanaguages, best practise, every dev speciallity, ect.

I'm in a similar positon to you and because my university isn't challeging enough (yet) I'm teaching my self c++ with the end goal of building a physics engine. My university has a focus on java btw.

Set your own goals otherwise you'll never be the best dev you can be.

Oh and for extra challenge upgrade to a double major of mathematics along with cs. Best choice I've ever made.

@luper "Set your own goals otherwise you'll never be the best dev you can be."

I'm going to make a wallpaper out of this beautiful sentence.
Thank you for the reply ;)

I recently discovered code retreats. (also coding dojos but didn't try this out yet)

Either do this or Make a small competition.

Besides that i often enjoy helping others and "growing" by their problems. (when all of this don't work I have same problem :/)

I've always said I learned more messing around on my own than from classes. Take care of your grades because some people do look at that, but the best thing you can do is find ways to challenge yourself. Small interesting projects that allow you to add tools to your toolbox