> what would be the biggest life lesson (in coding, or anything general)

Pursue what interests you and what fires up your passion, not what grown-ups tell you is “lucrative”, “prestigious”, “profitable” or somesuch.

I mean, my interests are just really niche in the sense that I like to glue projects and one of my favourite hobbies is to search if there is an open source replacement to something or if I can use open source things to do stuff

So there is intel tiber cloud and it gave me a free jupyter and I wanted to play minecraft server, so I went to something which is a fork of it and I saw that there was a guy who had created rootless patch of ssh but it wasn't working for me so I kindly asked them and they were really kind enough to help me and then I used something like pinggy or the thousand other cloudflare tunnel-esque solutions which work without any problem whatsoever directly through ssh

Earlier I used to use junest to then get something like ssh working.

Can I be honest? I am so proud of myself because I guess I did all this stuff an year ago but I still remember the day I asked my friend to join the mc server and I joined too, the ping sucked but 8 gigs ram or even more and no storage limits and complete freedom... and I thought of such stuff after almost 2 weeks of trying different things and learned a lot about nat punching etc.

So such stuff always makes really sense to me, just tinkering with software. But I feel like I need to create some professional software too in order to leave a legacy or just, I feel like, if I am being honest, that the things that I am doing aren't that valuable. Anybody can learn such stuff from me from some blog post I write but there is nothing that I can ever monetize.

I don't know why I am seeking monetization that much but its just that, I see all these kids hustling my age too and I feel like everyone's doing everything for the money... so why should I be any different. I get a lot of ideas but I feel like I can never earn a single cent out of it and I find it a little frustating. I feel less confident myself regarding if I will ever earn decent money or will just be a low level cog of this whole system.

Found it https://github.com/mkj/dropbear I really love this project so much, it really helped me do something really wonderful.

I have nothing to add to that.