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I'm from Norway and I got into programming around age 8 in the early 1990s. I was immediately drawn to graphics and sound code. I had problems with focus and order in school, but got away with it until secondary school, when I dropped out and began to look for work. I worked in call centres until I found programming work by showing off my personal projects.
I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI recently and the medications changed my life. This sharpened mental focus also gave me clarity about my passions.
SITUATION
I spend most of my time working on run-of-the-mill web and mobile applications. The vast majority of them are variations on the theme of "business logic with a database and a user interface" and they're dominated by subroutines that transport bits of data between different subsystems. The bread and butter of my job is troubleshooting and bug fixing.
PASSION
The thing that lights my fire the most is what you might call creative engineering. I define engineering as the design of machines or systems that solve practical problems through the application of mathematics and science, and would add the qualifier "creative" if the solution isn't obvious to you and creative thinking is required.
I love writing code for rendering and signal processing. A rare assignment at work gave me an excuse to implement a 3D rendering pipeline and I'm enjoying it immensely. This assignment is hard enough to offer a challenge, but not so difficult as to overwhelm me.
I have freelanced as a cartoonist, designer, filmmaker and electrical engineer. I play the piano and the guitar, and I can pass as a recording engineer, even if I never made any money on my music. People in these fields use computation-heavy software and this piques my interest, and programming allows me to scratch my own itches.
QUESTIONS
1. How would one go about finding a job that involves more creative engineering?
2. How would I go about it given my specific circumstances?