[achamian]

But if you consider your technical skills as a product you are selling to the companies who want a software solution you are upgrading your product/skill offering whenever you come up with a new and more reliable way to solve a given problem. Contribution to open source or writing a technical blog post is marketing. Learning new programming language is exploring a new market segment.

If you are passionate about programming, you are already doing one or more of these things for fun.