Not a bad question, but I'm not sure if everyone is totally open to answering it.
I'm a programmer by trade, I work in web.
I grew up playing games since I was 6, I'm 32 now.
For a couple months in-between jobs I joined up with a small indie here and programmed a game for him that was commissioned by Sony while he was working on another title.
It's on PSN@Home, though my name is no where on the credits, but are found in another game as a special thanks.
I also did some porting work for another one of his titles, and did some Steam integration.
Through him I met quite a few other developers who worked at EA and at Ubisoft, and other popular indie developers; I am good friends with two popular Sony indies here in Toronto as we grew up together in high school. They were making games back in Gr.11 I was just playing them, I tried my first mod of Serious Sam in Gr.12.
I didn't start to get into understanding 3D engines until I came to this forum; since reading some of the posts of the senior members I decided it was fine time to pickup a DX11 book and get cracking. Pretty inspirational some of these guys, sebbbi, mjp, graham, grall, brit, shifty, taisui, etc. reading their posts makes me want to learn.
I wish I had more time, though, with a wife and daughter, a house, games, stuff, and work it's hard to get around to everything.
I went with Xbox One for the option of being able to SDK off it, and that I was playing with Unity prior to going back into web development.
Having said that, I've got another game idea that I definitely want to make now, but I'm not sure if i want to attempt my own engine or go with Unity. Likely if I ever want to finish, I'll go with Unity. But for educational purposes, I would like to try my own engine.