I used to play a lot of Tetris as a kid. My strategy was to build up a wall that is missing the long piece and then reap benefit when it comes. Facebook came out with Tetris Battle 2P and surprisingly my strategy didn't get me far.

It turns out at the top level all the pros utilised something called the T-spin. I spent a lot of time learning it and for a while I was substantially worse than my previous intuitive strategy. But after a while I eventually got better and went as high as I could in Tetris. I've also had more fun than I ever had.

Absorbing complex techniques will allow much more fun. I mentioned this because there's a lot of software tools that have this upfront complexity, whose absorbed the complexity seems to love the effectiveness/efficiency that they have. The ones that come to mind are:

• Vim - DDH seems be having lots of fun
• Nix - Hashimoto's #1 most positively impactful technology I've learned in recent years
• k8s - Me right now trying to make infra as boring as git push

I think each of these cover a region of common software processes, and if you absorb their complexity, software development becomes a lot more fun.