Just printed your doodles and put them on one of our whiteboards.
Most of my fellow devs are from a 3D modeling and design background and have a hard time understanding anything more than push and merge (using a GUI). I tried to explain them numerous time, but they just phase out after a couple of minutes.
A lot of game developers have written a 'toy' game engine.
A lot of embedded developers have written their own little OS.
A lot of web developers have written a 'click this button to autogenerate web pages' tool.
And so on.
Face it. You are just not that hot. Another X Compiler for Y. Great. Probably doesn't really work. Senior devs probably care more about that you can finish boring project or stack. Spend hours on some tiny thing and make it work.
It probably also depends on how you present those hobby projects. Instead of saying "Look, I am so cool!", you can say you use this as a means to become a better programmer.
Did you live like this for a period of more than 5 years? You just gave a snapshot from an ideal situation. Fact is, income is always less, spendings are always more. Don't know about the US, but in Europe living on minimum wage, trying to cut all costs, there is very little you can save.
Good analysis. I'd like to add the cost of change. At some point you will move places or change jobs. You will have periods of less income and more spendings. This adds up. A few months of saving evaporate.
Come on, this is a very narrow view of things. There are a lot of people that can't just quit their job and start their own business, because well, they don't have any savings or access to credit. The work-money trade could be very very unequal.
They won't let you touch it. I've sent out more than 100 resumes and got in at only two despite having a bachelor + master in CS. The one company that I got in severely underpaid me. This is in NL and I might be an outlier, but I'm beginning to see a problem. I also applied (in secret) when I got the job, my odds didn't improve.
It should work on Kubuntu and X11, but I remember that the installation and configuration process (or at least the documentation) is a bit lacking. Make sure you also install the ibus-[input method] package. If you don't the ibus preferences still allows you to add a chinese/japanese input method, but it doesn't actually do anything. You might also want to restart your x11 session after that.
Most of my fellow devs are from a 3D modeling and design background and have a hard time understanding anything more than push and merge (using a GUI). I tried to explain them numerous time, but they just phase out after a couple of minutes.