Secondly, I feel your pain on not being able to 'show' people what I do (including my family). But, sometimes, if you did a nice job on an interface, you can 'show' them what you did. And recently there were commercials running for a local dealership that show-cased part of their website that I built. So, I rewound the commercial, paused it, and told my kids, 'See, I built that'. My kids thought it was cool. :-)

Just curious, have you done any wood working before? If not you may want to reconsider that thought on being able to do something on your first few tries that you'd keep in your home. My dad's always done woodworking and some of his early projects were fugly.

Please know that the code you write really truly is fantastic, and I sure as heck admire what you do.

Non-programmers (especially kids) are not typically interested by anything but the finished product, except under one circumstance: other people are publicly praising your work. Yes, we get that great sense of self-accomplishment when we write something extraordinary, but nobody else really knows until someone else is talking about your work. This being the case, we should all make a point to be the one talking about others' work, as technical as it may be – publicly compliment the accomplishments and triumphs other people are doing, especially verbally. When a co-worker comes up with a new way to cut processing time, save memory, or they just makes something cool, especially when they go well above the minimum, make a big deal out of it. This has many other benefits as well, such as building a team attitude and encouraging code reuse when other programmers hear what a peer is doing. This is the golden "do unto others" rule as well. One day, it will be you getting the pat on the back.

I know what you mean about showing it off to the kiddos though, and I like where Jim was going with Linux. I've tried to introduce my kids (all 5 & under) to programming, in very general terms, "why computer programs are good" and "what computers can do" (basically: remember and decide) as well as a trillion-foot-view of the internet, and then specifically, I show them some easy programming tasks, usually javascript because it's easy with no compiling.

Funny story, Ramada ran an ad in Money magazine, so my wife clipped it out and hung it on the kids' art wall, saying "this is what daddy did." It was advertising one of my projects, then the kids see, abstractly, what I do.

She also helps me work on my motorcycle and I've tried to make connections there – a motor isn't a magical block of metal that makes the car go. It's made up of lots of bits that when assembled in the proper order (I have problems with that part) it will run, a lot like software.