Farming is another one that seems to have a pull for a certain subset of hackers. Myself included, to some extent.

It's hard to have a more concrete, and real activity than farming. There's an immediacy and a sense of consequence to it that you just don't get when you are spinning castles made of air and bits as a programmer.

I play with Legos as my therapy, or when I start getting really burned out, take a weekend and go visit my parents in Maine. A weekend splitting firewood or tinkering on tractors or digging potatoes or deer hunting or the million and one other things that have to be done to keep up with a rural almost-farm are calming and help keep me grounded.

"What do you do?"

"I work on an API middleware layer for targeted advertising analytics service based on big data. What do you do?"

"I grow food in the ground that people eat to stay alive."

Yep, that's my dream. Siphon cash out of the internet to fund our small self-sustaining mini farm, where we grow or raise everything we eat.