It depends. When I was young I could spend hours coding and it felt amazing and like a great use of my time. Now in my 30s? No way, writing detailed code and spending all my time in front of the screen feels like I’m throwing away my life. All that minutia, whether useful or useless, is repulsive.
That's pretty much how I feel as well. In my 30s now, but unemployed and working a bit day to day on a project while sending out the odd job application in an abysmal market (in the same city as the author), but it's a gradual process and only after enjoying the sunny days as much as possible, socializing, fitness etc..
It's not that there's no time for coding in a hobbyist manner, but I'm careful about moderating the amount of time I allocate to it.
That said, I wasn't at even remotely the same level of execution ability as the author, and are probably still not, but I was starting to work with freelance clients in PHP and Angular.js, building some small technical experiments end to end, and relentlessly trying to get better at technical stuff. I could definitely still do that, just not at the expense of other things.
I'm in my 20s and I'm disappointed in myself for not spending time with my friends during school instead of wasting time making hacked together programs.
I came to realise I don't even like "real" programming only random quickly put together scripts.
When my friends explored all kind of things I was so stuck on coding and web dev and php. I didn't check out any other fields of interest or professions. When I read all the threads here about parents teaching their 4 year old BASIC to "indoctrinate them into programming", I cringe hard. They're stealing their kids' childhood and their drive to explore what they'd actually love.
As I've entered my 30s, I've noticed that people have also squandered their opportunities to get reps at friendbuilding outside of school, instead focusing on work, and everything has a cost. Now they're more employable than me, but I know exactly how to go about establishing strong friendships, and many of them are hopelessly stuck to either their spouse or their high school buddies and the prospect of moving elsewhere to advance the opportunity in the field they invested in would be quite difficult for some.
Regarding parents, what's made me cringe lately has been the shutting down of opportunities for their kids to form new bonds and play. There's a park I go to regularly that seems to be attended by well-off parents who go in groups. Last time I overheard a kid who must have been 5 playing with some other kid she just met on the swings. She ran over to her mother and said "This is ___ she's my new friend" and the mother basically wrote it off and said that's great but the other one has to go and then they left. The same outgoing kid had earlier wanted to try climbing this artificial rock I was doing, and the parent just showed absolutely no enthusiasm for letting their kid do it, she had somewhere else to be. I get that people are busy, but let your fucking kids play.
