So far mine has been to bootstrap my own company. It has been my goal for a while now and I tried different projects while doing freelancing work on the side. T

So far mine has been to bootstrap my own company. It has been my goal for a while now and I tried different projects while doing freelancing work on the side. The project that finally stuck is a digital signage service (https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com) now. For a long time I didn't even know I was doing digital signage: I just wrote the software to show info on a projector for a local hacker conference since I didn't find anything that satisfied my requirements. Later I ported it to the Raspberry Pi and added a price tag. Surprisingly people started purchasing the software and I slowly build a complete hosted service around it. Today it's a real company and profitable. Why is it rewarding: It's fully boot-strapped and as such there there's no need to rush new feature in the hope of finding a working business model eventually. Instead I can focus on quality and that alone is fun already. The other aspect is that it requires a vast range of different technologies properly working together: From the custom built Linux distribution for the Pi, the visual software that controls the output (written in C/Lua) up to the Website/Service/Cloud stuff. And of course building custom solutions based on the platform together with customers and see those running in production. I'll never get bored as a result and always learn something new.