[rudenoise]

I'd be interested to know a good place to start with this kind of thing.

Do you have some examples of software engineers contributing their skills to charities, open source projects aimed at assisting in these situations or just some boards or communities that can assist in finding a starting point?

[codeisawesome]

I'm searching for an efficient (read: not waste my time and affect my means of living) way to do this myself. The easiest way to start is to look for non profits operating in your area - or close to you - ask them to go have coffee with you (use LinkedIn). Do a virtual chat if necessary / pressed for time or distance. Discuss their work, and I guarantee you that ideas will come rushing out, this is what makes us tick. Then, just start. Do something for someone, talk about it.

This retired gentleman, for instance, who volunteers his time installing Linux on computers that are being sent to children in Africa: http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/827...

That's a great start! He was not even a software engineer!

[abalashov]

It's a luxury for someone who isn't deeply in the hole and doesn't have a family to support.

[codeisawesome]

Okay; I can empathise with that (not an empty statement).

In that case, I can suggest that your happiness (and 'effortless' productivity) can stem from wanting to dig yourself out of that hole and "set your family up for life" - because looks like you've committed to that direction.

This is easily construable as a presumptuous statement, these things are so much easier said than done. I have no right to play "guru" out here. I just care that a fellow peer in this same struggle is unhappy and talking to you as I would talk to myself and self-counsel.

Whatever you do, good luck, because you don't seem like one of the "bad people". Cheers.

[abalashov]

Thank you, that's much appreciated.

I don't know if my goals are anything so lofty as setting my family up "for life", but certainly, part of the issues are economic and, to some extent, money can cure them.

I'm not a low-income individual--certainly not by non-SV US standards. But I started this business with $200 to my name and a high personal expense base, and ground my financial history and financial position to powder as a result. I also lost big on an upside down property in the housing crisis, a still ongoing matter. The volatility and sliding-backwards stress of self-employment in a non-scalable niche is a big part of my stress, with cash flow being the dominant stressor; a highly volatile $200k income can be effectively discounted to like $65k. I'm often envious of people who get paid a good salary to just code and not have to think about anything else.

However, I'm capable of conceptually and emotionally disentangling all that from the question of whether I fundamentally like programming per se. I'm still burned out on it in the best of circumstances. If money were no object, I'd do it a few hours a week to meet some functional need, but I doubt I'd be writing new software.