I develop and sell Cursive (
https://cursive-ide.com), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does.
The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless.
I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.
The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless.
I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.