TLDR; Follow your dreams, follow your passions, and never give up. Keep having ideas and making them a reality! The moment you give up is the moment your projects will fail. Each day, you have a chance to seize your opportunity.

Longer story made shorter:

I never stopped learning though I stopped learning code for a long time. In fact, I had taught myself programming at 12 years old. I had tried and tried and I just didn't get it. It was Visual Basic 3.0. I kept opening it up and trying new things, but always was unsuccessful. One night, I had a dream about programming and designing applications. I woke up and wrote my first program. It was just an eight ball that chose a random response when a question was asked, but it certainly led me to write other programs throughout my teenage years, mostly to interact with America Online.

At 18, I lost interest completely in programming and stopped. Almost a decade later... from going to college to living in another country, I came home, broke, with a college degree in psychology that wasn't getting me anywhere, and I searched Craigslist, applying across the board to every single listing that seemed suitable. I applied even in areas that I knew I had no chance, or thought I had no chance, and one of those areas was a programming job.

I never thought I'd get a response, but this software company called me and tested me on my knowledge. While I didn't get 100%, I got a pretty good score and they hired me on spot. The job required knowledge of Visual Basic 6.0. Never thought that would ever come in handy, but it did. After a few months of training, I was back in the game.

Long story short... I worked for a tyrant boss that paid me far less than what a programmer should have been making, and I ended up looking for other jobs. Instead of searching for another programming job, I began my path into web design and development. I honestly thank that boss for teaching me everything I know. I suffered a lot with him because he was so arrogant and loved to talk down to me, but if there was any great lesson I learned from him that I still use today, it is that before you can code, you must understand what you are coding.

That means: WRITE OUT EVERYTHING BEFORE YOU DO IT. EVERY PROCESS, EVERY OPERATION, AND THE GOAL OF EVERY PROCESS. If you lose the vision of your program, than you have no program. Keep the focus and you will always be successful in whatever code you write.

I had already begun building websites, either for free or cheap so I decided to apply for other jobs about a year and a half after getting that first programming job.. I saw two jobs at the same time on Craigslist, and I ended up going for an interview for both.. the latter one didn't hire me right away, but eventually called me back, stating that they interviewed over a dozen people and I was the only one qualified enough for major consideration, so I ended up getting them both. Both were web design jobs, but one required 8 AM to 5 PM while the other required 6 PM to 2 AM. I was also freelancing on the side and had several paying clients. So I was pretty much working until I passed out. I slept very little and never took a day off. Having student loan debt, I ended up paying off my $40k debt in under 3 years. But the experience I got in those 2-3 years was equivalent to give me 5+ years experience as a web designer and developer.

One of the companies that hired me specialized in designing weather modules that displayed energy data on kiosks for solar panels in corporate buildings. The other one was a media company and paid me to design custom news web pages for big corporations like Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Kelly Blue Book, Avon, TripAdvisor, and many well-known pharmaceutical companies.

After over a year and a half of working non-stop, the solar energy web design company laid me off. I was upset and it took me a few weeks to get used to the fact that I no longer would be working at this job. Lucky for me, they had offered me a severance package: 3 weeks paid vacation on the condition that I would not file for unemployment. Little did they know, I had the second job, so I couldn't file for unemployment. So I ended up getting paid for 3 weeks on top of getting paid for my other job. That company ended up laying off everyone 6-9 months later and couldn't even afford to pay their employees, my former co-workers anymore, so they all had to sue to get their paychecks. It was a blessing in disguise to be the first to get laid off.

Anyways, I still worked for the night company from 6 PM to 2 AM and had my freelancing business. They would eventually give me a choice: move across the country or get laid off. I ended up moving and currently still work for them.

As far as what I do now: I picked up some big clients as a freelancer in the area who are making good money, so they pay me well to maintain their websites. I also run a few of my own websites that managed to get popular, so ad revenue kicked in and at least helps pay for the server and a few equipment items, such as my laptops when they break.

My most popular website is http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com which primarily focuses on what people do for work; mainly understanding jobs, careers, and the workplace. This attracts people from all walks of life and helps me network with hundreds of people and companies every year and I get to learn a lot of new information before it is ever released, as the website is sometimes a company's primary source of information distribution.

I also learned PHP and MySQL databases so aside from my day job, at night, I build web apps. Although I'm just getting into it, I'm hoping that it will bring in some recurring revenue. I cannot reveal all the details of these web apps at this time, but lets just say: I look around the Internet and if I see something can be improved or offered at a better price, I build it and become the competition.

One of these web apps is https://mypost.io/ which allows you to create beautiful simple web pages in minutes with just a few clicks. No registration, no account, no hassle. In addition to this, Google Analytics is not installed to try and help users remain completely anonymous. This has led to an increase of visitors particularly in Russia and China with the United States just behind.

I am always in non-stop learning mode and certainly would love to find the time to learn Ruby. For my job, aside from building custom news webpages, I also try to predict and develop new web templates for what the Internet will look like in the years to come, particularly how people might read their news. I love my job.. but if you asked me a decade ago if I would be where I am today, I would have probably believed it was never possible.

I will just finish with this: code is poetry and it is all about understanding what people want in today's fast-paced ever-changing tech world. Sure, you have Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other large networks and you might think to yourself: What can I possibly make that hasn't already been made? The advantage we coders have over the big companies is that we can specialize in the small things and give the user a much more personal experience than the big guys can. It is something they have lost over the years and that becomes our advantage of developing new web apps. Never stop learning and find your audience or your customers.

As a software engineer, coder, programmer, web designer, web developer, and all the other names we have... there is no excuse to be unemployed, out of work, or bored. You have work to do. Get started.