Us 'hobbyist' or 'amateur' programmers are very likely self-taught, and have another day-to-day profession. In my own case, I was a pharmacist and discovered co

Us 'hobbyist' or 'amateur' programmers are very likely self-taught, and have another day-to-day profession. In my own case, I was a pharmacist and discovered computers in the 1970s via my radio/electronics hobby. Consequently, all of my early computing was as a hobbyist in my learning-phase. Later on, when working at a hospital, I did actually do some 'professional computing' in COBOL, such as stock-control programs for the pharmacy itself as well as a smaller stock-control system for the hospital's main store. Since retiring from pharmacy, I have reverted back to 'hobbyist' programming, although I also have some 'sorta professional' aspects in doing a couple of accounting packages for both our personal and a family-partnership's tax preparations over the years, originally in BASIC, then COBOL, and now using C and mysql.