> I'll add that it helps to be financially sorted (and no longer motivated by trying to become uber rich).

Yup. I'll have to admit that I was quite nervous, when I was first being shown the door, repeatedly, upon looking for work at 55, but I've managed to "lean in" to living humbly, and being happy with my work.

It's not an "either/or" choice. We don't need to be a captain of industry, or raking in big bucks, in order to be a highly-relevant, productive engineer. I think that some of these companies were insanely self-destructive, to have ignored me; but, as things have turned out, I'm glad they did. I needed to be pushed out of the nest.

I have been writing systems for all my life. These usually have some kind of a "backend," which could be a device and/or network-connected server, and a "frontend," which is what a user of the system sees and interacts with. In some cases, I designed the backend, and in others, I adapted, or wrote, a frontend to an existing backend. I've written a number of realtime APIs; some of which have lasted for decades. I do good, robust, work.

I've really enjoyed writing software that presents a user interface. Over the years, I have come to enjoy the process of developing a "mental model" of a software system, and presenting it to a user. I come from an artistic background, so making it aesthetically-pleasant is also something that I like.

Here's an example: I'm in the process of rewriting one of my apps; a "speaker timer."[0] Simple enough, and the iOS system already has one, so there's no "burning need" for the app; but it's something that I use frequently, and I'm not so happy with the "stock" one.

But the one that I wrote a few years ago (Actually, it started with an ObjC one, in 2012) is too complex and awkward. It needs a rewrite anyway, because it's "dated," so this gives me an opportunity to "get it right."

I'm just finishing the initial setup screen. This screen is actually a greatly simplified amalgam of three other screens in the previous version. I think it works great. I'm not moving on to the other screens, until I consider this one "done," meaning that it has all the autolayout complete, works on an old iPhone SE, running iOS 14, has all the voiceover strings done in English, and has zero (as in "zed") bugs; even small ones. I use a personal process that I call "constant beta," where the app is always at "beta" quality; although it may be incomplete. This results in astonishingly high Quality, and a fairly predictable ship schedule. It also means that integration testing starts from Day One.

Just this morning, I spent a couple of hours, chasing down a weird bug, that turned out to be an iOS14 issue, on iPhone SEs (the 1st gen). I couldn't get it to happen on any other devices, running iOS14. Even though it was a UIKit bug (that seems to have been fixed, since), and it was on a deprecated OS, on a deprecated hardware platform, I still figured out how to work around it, and fixed the issue in my app (for the curious, it was because a toolbar that is directly attached to the safe area insets of the main view would cause a weird hang, upon rotate).

There's three more screens to go, and each one will receive the exact same level of attention. Once that's done, I'll do the localizations for the three other supported languages, and give it accessibility testing.

All along, it will be tested on devices, ranging from iPhone SE (1st gen), running iOS14, to iPad Pro 12.9 (running the latest iPadOS), and even Macs.

All that, for a $0.99 app. It sells like crap, and no one really cares, but I won't do any work, unless it has this kind of polish.

I'll probably write a Watch app, after I get the main iOS/iPadOS/Catalyst one done. I'd started one, previously.

I'm quite aware that this is a commercially infeasible workflow, and I don't care. It's like having a kid's trike, that was made by Mercedes engineers.

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara