I spent two years of my life doing nothing but self teaching myself programming. I was 19 when I started, and 21 when I found my first job as a programmer: a j

I spent two years of my life doing nothing but self teaching myself programming. I was 19 when I started, and 21 when I found my first job as a programmer: a junior in a Django e-commerce shop. I quickly found that what enthused me about programming was not present at all in the real industry, that apart from the paycheck, the job would be, probably for my life, identical to that of a Fordist production-line worker: insert necessary letters and punctuation here, repose, repeat. In a room in some building, sitting all along, dabbling with deadlines, weird demands. This was boring, and not what enthused me for programming at all, that was the explorative aspect, the tool-making. So I quickly decided that I'd never ever be a professional IT person. In the two years I had perfected my English, to the level that I'd say that my English level was near-native. This proved very useful to me, allowing me to qualify for an Italian philology course, from which I'll graduate with a GPA of 3.80/4.00 in a year and a half, and which for me has been a part of a literary/humanist adventure which started about the end of my teens. For a living... I don't really know. I have two main paths: academia as a phylologist, or sth. else. I really want to run a cafe, but I don't have any capital at all to start such a business. My overall plan for the future is pursuing my curiosities on one side and moderate, mentally-light and sociable work on the other, because, for me at least, the life is way too ephemeral and short to do otherwise. As for HN, well, I've not lost my interest in tech and programming. I use, for example, Emacs for any kind of documents, email, RSS/Atom feeds, etc., there are some bits of Elisp that I've published. I'm slowly studying Common Lisp as a programming language. Writing programmes is pleasurable and useful still to me, and following HN helps me keep in touch with it. Also, HN is the only ONLY _o_n_l_y_ place where I can share the same platform with people like Alan Kay, many other CS celebs, creators of software that revolutionised computing and is maybe used by billions of people, and the sheer fact that I'm typing into the same textbox that these smartest people are typing and that one day our paths may cross on this forum on an interesting topic is, God, oh God, exciting. So, here is some more than what you bargained for, I think :)) A really nice and relevant Ask HN that helped me get these out, so thank you so much! edit: add the missing `identical'.