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Comment on Ask HN: Outstanding Programmersparent

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Absolutely correct. At a minimum you need:

- the vision of what you want to achieve

- the skill to achieve it

- the time to build it

I find that time is the most difficult problem to solve, especially since I had a family.

Apply that to a larger scope than writing a program.

Your family is something that you're trying to build. Put into that the time needed. If you wind up with not enough time for writing a program, that's fine. In the battle for time between your family and your program, the program should lose.

One of my biggest failures was focusing too much on my pet projects when I had small children.

It is always difficult to balance our internal drives with the needs of those around us; both spending too much time on ourselves, and denying ourselves an outlet for creativity, can lead to resentment one way or the other.

I would say that I have been “lucky” that my childhood was a bit more difficult than some, so I had a clear vision of who I didn’t want to be, and that meant some personal sacrifices, especially around hobby projects.

I hope you’ve managed to rebalance now your kids are presumably a bit older.

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