I've been a professional developer for over 5 years, working in the gambling industry creating games for integrated cabinets in C++/DirectX, before moving to online using TS/WebGL.
Like most people, originally it was a way to get into the games industry but I've found that over time I've enjoyed it. I've moved from being a junior dev up to being the Dev manager, over-seeing every game and developer in the company. When I started, that meant just 2 other devs, but my dev team is currently 8 developers strong and continuing to grow, pushing out nearly 20 games a year.
Besides managing my team, the libraries and doing the more complex parts of our code changes, I also deal with the servers (k8s and general docker goodness), CI (gitlab hosted) and other webby things (AWS, auth etc).
While I do also do programming in my own time (this website for example), I try to have other, only slightly related hobbies. So I build and fly FPV drones, have rebuilt coffee machinery, built some headphone cables and recently been getting into woodworking.
