[cgarrigue]

Another hobbyist here. Back when I was a late teenager I might have contemplated doing it professionally but nowadays it would not my choice. Due to discovering other domains I am interested in along the years - like animation or game design - I chose to stay as a generalist instead of dedicating myself to one these 3 domains. Consequently I am at best average in all of them, programming included. The thing is, I may not be tackling very difficult problem like optimizing an emulator or a 3D engine but I still feel some satisfaction when fixing an issue in my code and more importantly, learning from it. In fact whatever your level is there are always new things to learn, be it in your field or another one.

On a side note programming as a hobbyist gives me sufficient technical knowledge to be able to communicate with developers using their own language, which can be very useful when doing the interface between a customer and a development team for example.