While I've been described and perhaps more fitting than not a 'code monkey', I've never felt the negativity implied with that phrase manifest in my life. Perhaps it's because it's just what I love to do, I love writing code and writing code all day while making good money has been pretty awesome. In a way, I have no idea why it's even a negative term.

CRUD apps are an incredibly small segment of the market today. Most of the stuff are much more complicated, and more fun. If you're fed up with what you do at work, do your 8 hours and explore more at home, I always find writing code for my own more fun and fulfilling. You can even showcase this to potential future employers.

I've always managed to find some tangents even while dealing the the most boring of code - some of it automation, I guess using vim for everything helps as well - text editing became almost programming and it's definitely more fun (and faster) that way.