I consider myself extremely lucky, but for large swaths of my professional career I've actually really enjoyed what I was doing. There have definitely been grin

I consider myself extremely lucky, but for large swaths of my professional career I've actually really enjoyed what I was doing. There have definitely been grindy projects where I'm not working on a project that interests me on a technology stack I don't care for, but especially at the start I always looked forward to going to work in my programming job. It might as well have been the best videogame I'd ever played before. Every day was full of learning new things and I was finally getting paid a wage for something I'd been doing for fun for years. It was a small office a short drive or bike ride away with people I got along with really well. It was a short walk to a few cheap restaurants and a grocery store. I rarely had extremely tight deadlines.