dmorin

A lifetime ago, circa 1994, a friend asked if I wanted to get into this up and coming World Wide Web thing. I said sure. There were 3 founders, and each hired a friend, so three employees. I think actually one of the employees was only ever a consultant.

We were funded by an existing company - an insurance agency. I think the thing lasted maybe 8 weeks? Primary founder of the startup had issues with the owner of the insurance agency over intellectual property. I was told by my friend all of this was coming in advance. I was given the chance to stay working for the main agency after all the founders quit. I quit with them.

But it was a ridiculously early foot in the door for doing web stuff, which I've done ever since. Before that I was doing medical devices. Definitely don't regret it.

At 53 years old I've been writing code for almost 40 years. Sure, I'm counting those very early, TRS-80, "I couldn't do what I wanted in BASIC so I learned assembly language" years because, why not? Those were the most passionate.

The answer is, sometimes. I guess probably never "as much as I used to be", no. I've got a family now. Given X hours of free time where I could spend it with them, and choosing programming? Nah. But, from the hours of 9pm to midnight-ish, when the house is asleep? Here we go.

Coding is my job. To that extent there are limits, both to effort and passion. I'm not necessarily a "live and breathe for your employer" guy, just because I will often work on code late into the night. I am and have always been a, "If I can solve this problem by writing code for it, I want to do it" guy. That's my choice. I don't feel like I'll get fired if I don't. And I don't feel competitive with the engineers half my age that know twice as many new languages and frameworks.

Coding is also what I love. I love getting things out of my head and making them into reality via code. It doesn't have to be a big thing. I wrote some code to make my predictions for the football pool. I won. I know very little about football. That was fun. I have a side gig where I make merch. I wrote some code to generate t-shirt layouts. I have a zillion little projects like that. I'm passionate about those things because that's me choosing to express those ideas in code, whether to make a buck, or to make my life a little easier, or sometimes just because I had the thought and wanted to see if I could make it work. Nobody makes me. I don't get passionate about tasks other people assigned to me.

Whenever my wife sees me at the computer she tends to call it work. I typically point out the difference because sometimes it technically is, sure. And I can turn that off when it's dinner time or what have you. But often I'm at the computer because I want to be. It's relaxing to me to have hands on keyboard. This might garner some eye rolls, but consider a painter who sets up an easel in the park and charges $10 to paint tourist portraits. That's using your skillset as your job. But is he passionate about that? Unlikely. When he's done for the day does he put away his brushes and think, "No more of that until tomorrow morning!" Probably not. He's probably just as ready to get up early the next morning and go paint the sunrise, just because he wants to.

Not to say my code has ever been art, by any measure :), but that just because you use the thing that you have a passion for to support yourself, doesn't mean you have to lose your passion for it.

Sometimes I see a lengthy text article that I tell myself I'll bookmark and read later, but I know I'm never going to read it. I much prefer audiobooks and podcasts. So I automated scraping the text from the article, piping it through text-to-speech, turning it into an MP3, and moving it to my phone so it shows up in my audiobook library. Next step is to make it an RSS feed so I can treat it like a podcast.