#contract coding

My programming background is not too terrible complex. I started with HTML/CSS, navigated my way towards PHP, and dropped anchor at JavaScript for a little while. Wanting a little more challenge, I attempted C++ Game Development for a while, failed miserably, and gave up for a year or so. Towards the beginning of last year, I discovered Unity, built a hackintosh, and starting learning again. That was the single smartest move I ever made in my programming career.

Unity was quite a different approach to Game Development, and allowed me to prototype my ideas quickly, so I could spend less time writing code and more time playing my games. After playing around with Unity for a couple of months, I switched over to Unity iPhone and starting writing iPhone Games. After about six months and six released games, this too became rather boring to me. In fact, I don't actually plan to release a game of my own ever again. I guess the disappointment of my ideas not being very fun to anyone else got to me a bit. After releasing about 3 games and not seeing a dime for the work put into it, I decided to shift the focus of what I want to do.

And now, we arrive at the reason for the post. I looked back over the past 6 years of my life and put it into a pretty easy perspective.

Writing my own websites and web applications, and doing my own marketing.

Writing my own games, and publishing them myself.

Writing my own applications, and setting a website up to sell them to the masses.

All of the above: Boring and not rewarding.

Sure, there are people like Kevin Rose who is known for the popularity of Digg, Mika Mobile for their iPhone Smash Hit - Zombieville, USA, and small companies like Panic, who - in my opinion - released one of the best HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP IDEs on the market. What most people don't understand, however, is that the odds of your super awesome website/game/application/whatever actually making money is somewhere near the odds of you winning the lottery, being struck by lightning, or losing an arm in a shark attack.

So why do I still write code? Simple. Because I love to write code. To me, however, the act of writing the code itself is not enough to keep me going. There has to be reward in everything that you do, or you will simply get bored with it. This is human nature, and it always wins.

Your choice here is simple. If the acting of seeing your application running and knowing that you wrote the code that made it possible is enough for you, then by all means, continue to self-publish. Although there will be disappointment, burn out, and all of the other bad things that come with any job, eventually you will write something that sticks. And when you do, it will probably all seem worth it.