Good question. I have 10 years of professional experience under my belt now. 10 years before that, from the age of 10 I was spending 100% of my free time playin

Good question. I have 10 years of professional experience under my belt now. 10 years before that, from the age of 10 I was spending 100% of my free time playing with and learning programming languages. I think an important piece to this puzzle lies in not getting attached to one specific field of application. Worked for about 3 years in a regular run-of-the-mill agency / website shop. Not very interesting, but good experience and skills gained. Worked for about 2-3 years in ecommerce. EXCRUCIATING. Left with little to no appreciation left for the craft, fell into a crisis of meaning. Allowed myself to be unemployed for a while and found appreciation again. Worked for about 1-2 years freelance. Very cool projects, but I couldnt take the constant stress of dealing with clients and managing moneyflow. Stopped. Now I've been building a venture with a business partner of mine for about one year, which has somehow completely evolved and changed into effectively managing the technical side of a quantitative analysis firm that runs a NYSE-listed Hedgefond. INCREDIBLE. Every day feels like christmas, noone to answer to, 100% decision force on anything, and not even involved with the regular operations, just dreaming up cool new algorithms and ideas for our internal system all day. But this, too, I might leave some day. I truly believe that a programmer is not a static definition especially given the insane influx of data and new concepts we process every day, and that the only way to truly find ourselves in it is to not get attached to anything. The zen programmer, so to speak. Code is not limited to anything. Become the code, not the job description