In an earlier post, I mentioned that:
the dream is to be the next Patrick McKenzie, Joel Spolsky, or Eric Sink, launching a bootstrapped software product and hitting it big.
I should clarify exactly what I meant. I meant that in the sense that the struggling literature student dreams of being the next Garrison Keillor, or the budding actor dreams of being the next Matt Damon.
Writers write because they enjoy it; actors act because they enjoy it; programmers code for the same reason. None of these people expect to make it big; in fact, that’s not the point at all.
Just like there are thousands of unpublished novelists and undiscovered actors, there are similarly thousands of people like me coding just for fun. In his early days, Garrison Keillor kept sending manuscripts to the New Yorker, not totally expecting to get published, but hey, you’ll never know if you don’t try. Some editor in New York decided to run one of his stories, and the rest, as they say, is history. Yes, Garrison Keillor wrote because he enjoyed writing, without many expectations, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t also be ambitious.
Most writers write for fun, not money, and that’s OK. Same goes for actors and independent software developers. It’s an avocation, something that transports you to another world, one which you understand fully.
Writers and actors and software developers don’t let their avocations consume their lives. We have jobs and hobbies and families and we like to get outside and smell the spring air after a cool rain as much as the next person.