I turned 41 yesterday. Have been programming for over 18 years. Like you I also love it. And since work coding does not offer me enough of a challenge always. I like to do some fun (challenge kind of) coding on my own. Some random examples of the fun programming I have done:
1) When I started out programming, some two decades back, I did a program which was tough for me then (I believe its a pretty standard program given to people who are learning programming). It was - 'How to place 8 queens on a chess board so that they don't attack each other'.
2) A C -program which prints itself.
3) More recently I read Norvig's solving every Sudoku puzzle (http://norvig.com/sudoku.html), so went ahead and wrote my own (without looking at his solution of course).
4) Solving this ('Going Office' on Interview Street : https://www.interviewstreet.com/challenges/dashboard/#proble...) one gave me immense amount of satisfaction, when I did a couple of months back. As I had not done complicated graph stuff earlier. I game my family a treat, just because I was so happy when all my test cases passed :-)
So programming has been a joy of my life. Hope to do it for many more years. Will try.
1) When I started out programming, some two decades back, I did a program which was tough for me then (I believe its a pretty standard program given to people who are learning programming). It was - 'How to place 8 queens on a chess board so that they don't attack each other'.
2) A C -program which prints itself.
3) More recently I read Norvig's solving every Sudoku puzzle (http://norvig.com/sudoku.html), so went ahead and wrote my own (without looking at his solution of course).
4) Solving this ('Going Office' on Interview Street : https://www.interviewstreet.com/challenges/dashboard/#proble...) one gave me immense amount of satisfaction, when I did a couple of months back. As I had not done complicated graph stuff earlier. I game my family a treat, just because I was so happy when all my test cases passed :-)
So programming has been a joy of my life. Hope to do it for many more years. Will try.