I've got one. I use it only for writing. It's been great for that because it's terrible at everything else. It is essentially a modern-day word processor for me. I can work for hours and hours unplugged and if I need to do a bit of research, I can without having to pull out my distraction machine (phone).
I built a tool for educators ~7 years ago at my previous employer. That employer shut down and I bought the tool then sold it to my current employer. This year, my employer decided to pivot and we are no longer serving software services. I now have ownership again with multiple clients paying $5k a year for the tool. I was restricted on my time spent on the tool while it belonged to my employer, but now that it's mine again, I can start working on needed improvements and seeking out more clients.
I also have a fairly large YouTube back catalogue of ~1,650 videos. While most of my videos get less than 50 views, I still generate ~$500 a year in AdSense.
My family had Atari 400 with a tape drive. I remembered buying a tape with a game. We also use it for basic programming language and the Astroids game using a cartridge.
Yep, I had the BASIC cartridge and used the tape drive almost exclusively for that. Coded up all sorts of little projects on that machine. I hated the membrane keyboard, but it worked!
How about the third position (which I find myself in in): Staff->Line engineer.
I work primarily on an internal support product which the company decided to license to other entities... at a ridiculously low price. We support dozens of instances and thousands of users, yet bring in less than half of one developers net salary.
And, of course, my departments performance is judged on the Line work, not the Staff work.
This pretty much describes my day job and I love it. Is our codebase a hot mess? Yeah, we have lots of debt from previous devs, but we're working on it!
The opposite actually. I used to get hangry and be irritable all the time. I would also have blood sugar crashes if I ate carbs (hypoglycemic). Switching to 18:6 completely eliminated blood sugar issues and I am generally more docile.
I live in Northern WV and I'm fully aware that our rivers flow North, but for some reason, when I clicked on my area and saw the route run up to Pittsburgh before traveling South to the Gulf, I was taken aback.
I still have my 800. It was given to me sometime in the 80s when my cousin passed. It came with the BASIC cart, a tape drive, and a book called something like 101 BASIC GAMES that were just copies of source code. That machine started me on an obsessive path of learning languages and programming at ~10 years old that was all-consuming until I graduated high school. I hated the stupid membrane keyboard, but the lessons learned on that machine were invaluable to my curiosity.
Pretty much same story here -- few things affected the path of my life as much as that one device did. I cannot overstate its impact on my ability to get creative with limited resources, seek out and solve tough problems, and have pride in creating things for others.
I remember really struggling to get the tape drive to work. Sans internet, it was quite a challenge to figure out how to get it going. That was quite likely the spark that made me want to learn anything and everything about hardware.
I'll have to dig it out. I don't remember the illustrations. I remember working on a blackjack program forever. Debugging line by line. Finding my typos and getting it to work. That was one of my proudest moments.
Last year, I started working on a randomly generated, text-based adventure game. I made random equipment and room generators. Started working on enemies, and lost steam. I turned it into a Mad-Libs style dungeon room/loot generator, and that's neat and all, but I've been wanting to dig back in and finish that project to some level.
I love my paperwhite, EXCEPT for the ridiculous place they put the power button. It's right where the device rests on my finger and I inadvertently turn the unit off quite frequently.
