To me, writing a new program is like a puzzle. Before you write any code for a large system, you have to carefully craft each piece in your mind and imagine how all the pieces will fit together. If you don't, your solution may end up being undefined.

What I mean is, I often don't know what I'm doing so I'll come to this site and beg for a code snippet, and then somehow try to hack it into my projects.

I started writing GW-Basic when I was around 8 years old. Then it progressed from there, went to california university and did some Python and C++, but really didn't learn anything(college = highsk00l++). I've mostly been self-taught, took awhile to break bad habits and I'd say only in recent years would I consider myself understanding of design patterns and all that stuff (no but honestly procedural dudes, I would not want to design and maintain a large system procedurally, yous crazy).

And despite my username, money has NOT been a big motivator. I've gone from job to job, I can usually get the work done perfect very quickly, any delays on my part are understandable (well about as understandable as it gets in the industry). But I ain't gonna work for peanuts because I got mouths to feed.

Why do you program? Why do you do what you do?