Been programming for 32 years 25 of which professionally. I never had a job as such; I always started companies based around tech of which I was the lead coder/CTO and it gave me a great life. I have other hobbies but I love coding and find it hard to imagine living without it; the creative process, the making of something that did not previously exist, the idea that you can make something without any funds; be it with or without money. If everything fails today, I can start another company tomorrow without spending any money. I do not know of another field where that works like that.
I still get happy when something I worked hard on works and even sells.
That said; I would not work in circumstances some here work in; commuting for hours a day, glueing together crud apps, tons of stress and no upside besides money. I always say that if you are a decent programmer you do not have to do any of that. Unfortunately people do not like to take risks and apparently working like a dog makes them feel better.
In short; 10/10 happy coding more than fulltime for over 30 years. Hoping for at least another 30.
What sort of companies / products did you build? How did you first start? Did you sell the company, or is it a revenue generating model? How did you support yourself while building the company?
My first companies were all services companies so they immediately generated reveneu and were thus easily bootstrapped. I believe it was easier begin 90s to 2000s to do that though. With that money and also during that period I started building products: a dating site, a CMS, a freehosting OS and large freehoster, a POS for grand cafe's and some niche LOB dev products. I sold all of those after running them for a while; in the end they were all very profitable and fun because of the diversity. The company formed around the CMS grew to 300 people in the high times. That I did not like at all so I quit as CTO and opened the R&D dep of that company with 2 colleagues.
Currently I'm working on the hardware and software for a smart credit card while I have a services company to offload work to and do work for other clients.
Services still work well as bootstrap; first do some freelance work in a client office, start discussing working from home when the trust has been built, start suggesting to get more people on board when it gets busy. Before you know it you have a small team and you can start cloning that process until you have enough portfolio to do less intensive sales. You will never run losses: quite the opposite. When your team takes over enough you can work on side projects if you want to.
I still get happy when something I worked hard on works and even sells.
That said; I would not work in circumstances some here work in; commuting for hours a day, glueing together crud apps, tons of stress and no upside besides money. I always say that if you are a decent programmer you do not have to do any of that. Unfortunately people do not like to take risks and apparently working like a dog makes them feel better.
In short; 10/10 happy coding more than fulltime for over 30 years. Hoping for at least another 30.