It is extremely mentally demanding to do both, even for someone with an overactive brain. I reached a point of severe burnout in 2025 and cut back to part-time work. I'll have to ramp up my hours again soon because, contrary to one of the other comments, I didn't get rich during 1990s/2000s boom.
As for how I did it, I would wake up very early and put in a few hours of writing, then I would put in a full day's work at the office. After my first twelve years or so in the industry, coding was almost second nature and came quite easily. Also, I do much of my writing and programming in my head while I'm walking, running or biking. (I bike to work and back every day.) By the time I sit down to write or code, I already know what I'm going to write, so it's just a matter of getting it through the keyboard.
But yeah, do both for a few years and it really taxes your brain. In both novel writing and programming, you're carrying an entire world in your brain: the plot and characters are one world, the architecture of the software you're working on is another. By 2025, I truly, literally felt like I needed to be shipped off to a madhouse in the countryside. A hundred years ago, people used to call that "the rest cure for a nervous breakdown."
Anyway, cutting back to part-time work has been a huge help. Sanity restored.
Ha! I started my career in a company where I had to pump out custom web apps as fast as humanly possible. The apps were successful, and then I had to maintain them for several years. That's where the real learning occurred. I learned the cost of every one of my shortcuts and poor design decisions the hard way.
Many years ago, some famous developer said, "Always write your code as if the person who's going to maintain it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." As I fixed my poor design choices one by one over endless late nights, I sometimes felt the anger of a violent psychopath toward the former, ignorant me who had stupidly plagued current me with all these problems.
When you learn the hard way, you know exactly why good design decisions are considered good. In later jobs, one of my fundamental goals for every new project was "I never want me or anyone else to have to answer a 3 a.m. call about why this system isn't working."
I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with ghostscript. I would like to remove ghostscript from the mix, so when I have some time, I may try again to do it all with WeasyPrint.
I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor edits after publication is also painful, as the author notes, and can be error prone if you fail to make identical changes to all formats.
The problem was bad enough that I built by own markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript. This also allows me to use git for version control, and I can make formatting changes using vanilla CSS. My tools are currently too crude for the average non-tech writer to use, but they save me hours every time I use them.
For any of you hackers out there looking for an untapped market, try making a user-friendly tool that converts Word, PDF and/or similar formats to the print-ready PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 formats. At the moment, all the existing tools are proprietary and expensive, and many are difficult to use. This won't be a big money maker, but it will certainly be welcome by many indie authors.
I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degree), and may also have a family and a mortgage. They have relatively high salaries, plus health insurance, and they can't work when they're sleeping, sick or on vacation.
I once worked for a software consultancy where the owner said, "The worst thing about owning this kind of company is that all my capital walks out the door at six p.m."
AI won't do that. It'll work round the clock if you pay for it.
We do still need a human in the loop with AI. In part, that's to check and verify its work. In part, it's so the corporate overlords have someone to fire when things go wrong. From the looks of things right now, AI will never be "responsible" for its own work.
I think AI will substantially thin out the ranks of programmers over the next five years or so. I've been very impressed with Claude 4.5 and have been using it daily at work. It tends to produce very good, clean, well-documented code and tests.
It does still need an experienced human to review its work, and I do regularly find issues with its output that only a mid-level or senior developer would notice. For example, I saw it write several Python methods this week that, when called simultaneously, would lead to deadlock in an external SQL database. I happen to know these methods WILL be called simultaneously, so I was able to fix the issue.
In existing large code bases that talk to many external systems and have poorly documented, esoteric business rules, I think Claude and other AIs will need supervision from an experienced developer for at least the next few years. Part of the reason for that is that many organizations simply don't capture all requirements in a way that AI can understand. Some business rules are locked up in long email threads or water cooler conversations that AI can't access.
But, yeah, Claude is already acting like a team of junior/mid-level developers for me. Because developers are highly paid, offloading their work to a machine can be hugely profitable for employers. Perhaps, over the next few years, developers will become like sys admins, for whom the machines do most of the meaningful work and the sys admin's job is to provision, troubleshoot and babysit them.
I'm getting near the end of my career, so I'm not too concerned about losing work in the years to come. What does concern me is the loss of knowledge that will come with the move to AI-driven coding. Maybe in ten years we will still need humans to babysit AI's most complicated programming work, but how many humans will there be ten years from now with the kind of deep, extensive experience that senior devs have today? How many developers will have manually provisioned and configured a server, set up and tuned a SQL database, debugged sneaky race conditions, worked out the kinks that arise between the dozens of systems that a single application must interact with?
We already see that posts to Stack Overflow have plummeted since programmers can simply ask ChatGPT or Claude how to solve a complex SQL problem or write a tricky regular expression. The AIs used to feed on Stack Overflow for answers. What will they feed on in the future? What human will have worked out the tricky problems that AI hasn't been asked to solve?
I read a few years ago that the US Navy convinced Congress to fund the construction of an aircraft carrier that the Navy didn't even need. The Navy's argument was that it took our country about eighty years to learn how to build world-class carriers. If we went an entire generation without building a new carrier, much or all of that knowledge would be lost.
The Navy was far-sighted in that decision. Tech companies are not nearly so forward thinking. AI will save them money on development in the short run, but in the long run, what will they do when new, hard-to-solve problems arise? A huge part of software engineering lies in defining the problem to be solved. What happens when we have no one left capable of defining the problems, or of hammering out solutions that have not been tried before?
OK, maybe it isn't capitalism but US society that implies that promise. Many (insensitive) people respond to tales of economic woe by saying, "Get a job!" As if that's going to solve even your basic money woes. As others in this discussion have noted, many people employed full time still struggle to provide the basics. That part of the social contract just isn't holding up for a lot of people. And that's a recipe for social unrest.
There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they're distributing three times as many meals per month as they served before the pandemic. And this is an area of relatively high employment.
People working service jobs simply can't afford the basics, and that's a problem. Part of capitalism's implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."
After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large code bases and because the visual debugger is so easy to use.
I still use emacs in the terminal for scripting and for smaller coding projects, for anything over SSH, and for blogging and fiction writing. It's a distraction-free editor that has very powerful features when you need them, but doesn't shove them in your face. It's also nice to be able to do everything with the keyboard and not have to keep reaching for the mouse.
A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and South America. All three felt betrayed by the US government. They said, essentially, "We put our lives on the line many times to try to stop the flow of drugs. Then the government turned around and basically gave the pharmaceuticals license to sell this stuff professionally, through people's personal physicians."
These retired agents didn't see the drug war as a war on "bad guys," but as an effort to stop the destruction drugs wrought in people's lives. After all their work, their own government undermined their efforts.
My own doctor was taken in by Big Pharma's sales pitch and wound up going to prison for over-prescribing their pills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurwitz. Though to hear Big Pharma tell it, there was no such thing as over-prescribing.
If you want to get an idea of how out-of-hand the prescription frenzy got, take a look at John Temple's book American Pain, which describes the pill mills in South Florida. Towns in Appalachia used to send charter buses to these pharmacies. After a 12-20 hour bus ride, each passenger would pick up hundreds or thousands of pills, then ride home to sell them in their small country towns.
Some of the pill mills, which were fully licensed by the state of Florida, were cash-only and would haul garbage bags full of money to the bank each day at closing. For a summary of Temple's book, see https://adiamond.me/2020/01/american-pain-by-john-temple/
Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different book genres on Amazon then chose a genre where he thought he could squeeze onto the top ten bestseller list. He's been cranking out books for years and selling pretty well. If you check his author page, you'll see he has quite a few titles out.
Basically any company offering special services that work with very large data sets. That could be a consumer backup system like Carbonite or a bulk photo processing service. In either case, legal agreements with customers are key, because you ultimately don't control the storage system on which your business and their data depend.
I work for a non-profit doing digital preservation for a number of universities in the US. We store huge amounts of data in S3, Glacier and Wasabi, and provide services and workflows to help depositors comply with legal requirements, access controls, provable data integrity, archival best practices, etc.
There are some for-profits in this space as well. It's not a huge or highly profitable space, but I do think there are other business opportunities out there where organizations want to store geographically distributed copies of their data (for safety) and run that data through processing pipelines.
The trick, of course, is to identify which organizations have a similar set of needs and then build that. In our case, we've spent a lot of time working around data access costs, and there are some cases where we just can't avoid them. They can really be considerable when you're working with large data sets, and if you can solve the problem of data transfer costs from the get-go, you'll be way ahead of many existing services built on S3 and Glacier.
One of the great lines of 18th century theater comes from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The School for Scandal." Sir Peter, alarmed at his wife's extravagant spending, asks her why she buys such expensive things. She says, "Because I have taste." To which he replies, "You had no taste when you married me."
As for how I did it, I would wake up very early and put in a few hours of writing, then I would put in a full day's work at the office. After my first twelve years or so in the industry, coding was almost second nature and came quite easily. Also, I do much of my writing and programming in my head while I'm walking, running or biking. (I bike to work and back every day.) By the time I sit down to write or code, I already know what I'm going to write, so it's just a matter of getting it through the keyboard.
But yeah, do both for a few years and it really taxes your brain. In both novel writing and programming, you're carrying an entire world in your brain: the plot and characters are one world, the architecture of the software you're working on is another. By 2025, I truly, literally felt like I needed to be shipped off to a madhouse in the countryside. A hundred years ago, people used to call that "the rest cure for a nervous breakdown."
Anyway, cutting back to part-time work has been a huge help. Sanity restored.