> It was the same thing with switching to Linux, where I have a more personal relationship with my laptop because I've taken the time and effort to care for it.

> It was the same thing with switching to Linux, where I have a more personal relationship with my laptop because I've taken the time and effort to care for it. Don't suggest this to a sysadmin. OS religious arguments aside, sysadmins don't want to take time to "care" for machines any more than they have to :) To the OP: What if you tried to get into DevOps or System administration? Futzing around with hardware and OS level stuff may be something just different enough for you to get back into it. There's also a lack of sysadmins who can actually program full applications, so that's a huge plus since you presumably know how. Admins script, but the ones who didn't have any formal computer science training don't really know how to write complex applications, use databases, etc.