I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Making me happy is like optimising an image for the web.

Just strip me, interlace me and give me a sampling factor of 420 😂

Jesus and I just freaked myself out real real bad due to allergies and unfortunate drug cocktail holy shit that was an extremely unpleasant 45 minutes of my life

so apparently coffee inhibits the enzyme that recycles histamines (and you make histamines when you have allergies)

I woke up today, did gardening, turns out my allergies are back. was making a kettle of hot water for tea and coffee while gardening. aired out the apartment also (aka aired the allergies in)

drank the coffee. then my head felt like it was gonna explode. the inflammation was just squeezing my damned brain. did a bunch of airplane ear pressure maneuvers and it basically cleared up the worst of it. 5 hours later I STILL have porcupine prick feels on my face from the pollen. that's kind of weird generally it takes 1-2 hours for my allergies to subside

made food, had dinner. the EXACT same meal as yesterday with the exact same supplements as yesterday

20 minutes after I eat and put everything away... my nose suddenly clears, my ears are clear. crazy! these have been fucked for like 7 days for me now.
30 minutes. yeah my inflammation went down so much I started cold sweating... adrenaline is pumping. my blood pressure is too low. my stomach is in knots (I only figured out what it was called after lol)

and then was the longest 15 minutes of my recent history. was freaking out, exercising, pacing, trying to keep my blood pressure up.

hahahahaha whoops

allergies > make histamines that cause inflammation
coffee > prevents recycling of histamines, so you get histamine backup all over your body which makes the inflammation even worse
cysteine with dinner > gets converted into glutathione in your body which is a strong anti oxidant. which will reduce inflammation and all the good stuff (though if you OD you'll bleed to death. it's ok tho it's like x10 the normal dose and I take 1/2 the normal dose. I took this yesterday and didn't even feel it!)

well the coffee caused so much inflammation I peed out like 2 litres of water
coffee also apparently makes you make more glutathione than normal!

... so when I ate that cysteine pill... all my inflammation from my cold/flu I've had for 7 days, AND the new discovered allergies, all dropped entirely... and my dehydrated ass' blood pressure dropped... holy fuck that was such a fucking unpleasant experience

I've never been a risk-averse person. one of the things that really attracted me to software is that you can try as many dumb ideas as you want and the only thing it will cost you is time. I grew up poor so that was important. in real life though, being risky is kinda risky. my fast and loose habits suck.

I say this but let's be fair... there is no way for you to predict this. just gotta hope you're strong enough to survive your every day living attempts I guess