Shhhh! It's a secret! Don't tell anyone!
I guess the cat's out of the bag.
I used to be a programmer (once upon a time) I was a relational database programmer for a bunch of police departments in the big city to my north. I worked on the embedded computer systems that linked to a master database of contacts when you get pulled over. My job was to take data given to me that was dumped from some VMS machine, write a parser to get it into an SQL database, and then rationalize the database to create logical key/database groupings for display on a HTML front end, which I also worked with.
Side-technologies included setting up the police departments on an LDAP authentication system, with my own built-in schema hooks to PAM so you could auth on both Linux and Windows.
The whole shop was Linux/Unix based.
So what happened?
I burnt out after six months. I'm not talking about "I'm going to take a break" kind of burn out but a "I feel like I'm going to crash into a moutain eject-eject-eject" kind of burnout.
I quit being a Database programmer and became a Janator in a hospital, before I got fired from that job.
I never touched a line of code until I started Q-gears. Donno why. I still lothe application development, but it can be charming sometimes, and so I gave what I could.
Anyway, I didn't mean to pour out my life here. Let's just say that I code when my body feels like it, and I much rather be looking at pictures of Ayumi Hamasaki...
My goodness she's hot...