How One Hacker Quit the Programming Life for Bluer Skies

Some people believe that everyone should be a programmer. Two years later, he published an online memoir detailing his exit from the software world, and it became an instant internet classic, reflecting the desire of many developers and other white-collar workers to somehow escape their office cubicles and do something "real." "I think it's unlikely that I'll ever need to rely on my ability to write code to feed myself again," Duff says. Though some say that Duff was never a "real coder" if he was willing to give up the life, he says he always loved programming -- and still does. "I remember I'd been using the internet for a year or so -- on Gopher, and searching FTP sites using Archie -- before ever seeing a webpage," he says.