I’m beginning to suspect that Marco Alka is my alter-ego as a lot of his answers either are very similar to mine, or resonate with me deeply.
With that out of the closet, i did it the other way around, too. I started programming as a little kid, about the age of 9 or 10. I looked at the source of all 4 apps bundled with QBasic, and learned a lot from them. I built a file manager in BASIC, some nifty text mode games, and the controlling interface of a space station (a fictional one, obviously). At 14 i switched to Pascal with similar projects. At 16 i started using many languages in parallel: C, Tcl, shell scripting, and Perl. A bit later came PHP, and meanwhile a lot of Linux server administration.
Soon i found myself in my first job as the sysadmin of a small ISP, then a PHP web developer, then a sysadmin of another company, then as a last level support of a huge aviation company, then as a programmer of a huge telco company. All this while retaining programming as a hobby. But…
I have other hobbies, too. I like working with wood. I have an old house to fix broken things in. I like making and fixing stuff, like toys of my kids. So i’m far from being constrained in programming. This helps a lot with the burnout factor which, like it or not, will reach you if you do the same thing for a long time.
Have fun coding (but have a backup plan)!
Gergely Polonkai
You have to believe in things that are not true. How else would they become?