[Brian_K_White]

Makery stuff is still fun, but the work stuff used to be fun and now is not.

I did a lot of sysadmin so it was a lot of individual unix servers and different kinds of integration problem solving getting printers or networks to work or rigging up weird edi's over modems or ftp etc, getting some bespoke backend software to talk to some weird machine where nether the OS, nor app, nor apps language, nor wierd machine vendors provided that last bit of help needed to connect them together, mini-proto-HA by just making a better more redundant ordinary server,.. basically "IT rigging"

That was for me all just great fun. But now 99% of that is just cloud services and they are all soul sucking to me, probably more because of the corporate environment they get used within more than the tech itself, where you and everyone else are hardly treated any different than the machine. Everything is so managed that I don't feel like the modern tools are expressive and empowering like the old tools. Everything is services with predefined limits and potentials based middle of the bell curve assumptions about what people need vs languages and hardware where you rigged up your own interesting solutions to each new problem.

So I too now play with arduino/esp32 toys and open source projects for fun, and am pretty glad I already made enough money that it doesn't matter that no one would pay me for this.

[unnouinceput]

I went freelancer. Out of aprox. 12 hours per day I do programming my clients get like maximum 3. Rest are for me personally. Learn new stuff, play with different tech, etc. Most of the time my playing time also translates into paying stuff from my clients later on the road, but not immediately.

And yes, some projects I get from clients are soul sucking, but I chose them fully aware of that, hence the balance heavily in my favor in terms of hours. I get back my soul after was sucked this way :).