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Just a small note… Making my programming hobby into a job has resulted in a wonderful and rewarding career for me. I’ve now been coding professionally for around 25 years. I go through waves, but you’ll often find me coding in my spare time before work, after work, or on the weekends. I do much of the stuff this author mentions too, such as designing and 3D printing parts for repairs around the house.

Anyway, to each their own, but I purposely made my hobby my career and I believe I’ve benefited greatly from that.



And if that has worked out for you, that's great! It's not wise to make generalizations about this kind of thing.

To be clear, I think using what I said in the first bit against the author or comment I replied to is kind of side-stepping the real issue. The first of my comment essentially translates to: turning a hobby into a profession is a high risk, high reward scenario. It can work out fantastic (as in your case) or you can come to hate something you used to enjoy.

Programming-adjacent things, I can enjoy. I like puzzles, I like factory building games, I could see myself building robots or getting into 3D printing random bits. But I don't think that I would ever sit down and write a software library outside of work without a strong personal incentive. I'd just rather spend my time on other things I enjoy equally as much.




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