Well, I got my first for pay opportunity because a college about a hour and a half away from mine saw a HyperCard stack I wrote and posted on AOL - it was an improved Eliza clone. He wanted to integrate it into a HyperCard based Gopher server that was in 1994.

Then that led to an internship in 1995 at another company and I got a job there in 1996.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since then. The only reason I have any type of open source presence now is because my current job has a very straightforward open source process that allows us to get approved to put reusable artifacts from customer engagements on the corporate open source Github organization (https://github.com/aws-samples) under an MIT license.

That means I am free to fork it once it gets approved so it shows up on my own profile.