For myself, I love developing software. The design, problem-solving, coding, testing, but, most importantly, seeing folks use it, and knowing that my software is A Good Thing.
For most of my career, I was a manager in my "day job," which meant that my tech chops were barely exercised.
My company didn't have a "shower clause" in their employment contract, so I could work my own gig. I deliberately avoided making money, and I also deliberately avoided writing anything that could compete with my company, or make them look bad (Which I easily could have). It was a matter of Respect (for me).
So I did open-source stuff, for over twenty years. I developed a fairly robust system that has become the de facto world standard for a particular demographic, and a few apps and whatnot, around it.
I have also developed a whole slew of SPM modules, which are really high-Quality. I use most of them, myself (eat my own dog food), so their Quality needs to be "top shelf."
I wrote and released over 20 iOS (and Watch, Mac, and TV) apps, since 2012, but I'm down to just a couple, nowadays.
I'm writing a fairly ambitious native iOS app, right now. It's the frontend for a fairly intense set of servers. I've been working on it for a year (and an additional seven months, writing one of the servers, and the other server is the one I mentioned previously -I've worked on that for over ten years). I feel that it is just getting to the point where we can start refining the UX. I have been establishing the infrastructure, to this point.
That's where my heart lies. I'm actually a very good manager, but I don't love it, and don't miss it.
Was this in the front-end web development world? Because it’s not the case in the rest of the software industry. Tell some 35 year old embedded programmer that they are “too old” to write CAN bus code and they’ll look at you like you have three heads.
