Coding in your spare time

c_man

I'm contantly hearing (on other sites etc etc) about how 'real' devs must have side projects and code in their spare time. At the risk of starting a holy war I'm curious to get boardsies opinions on the matter.

So I'm a dev with nearly three years experience under my belt, consider myself fairly proficient yet it's extremely rare for me to write code in my spare time. And even when I do, it's usually just messing around seeing some language/framework quirk or feature. I really like programming but I get enough done at work tbh. My free time is for other activities.

Now don't get me wrong, I read plenty on our area day to day. But the thought of taking on tickets, defect triaging or whatever for some open source project gives me The Fear. The kind where you get when hungover and heading into work.

Asking around, my stance seems common enough among work colleagues so what about the rest of ye? Am I just a crap programmer? Or just lazy?

Raging_Ninja

I want to do their things in the day. There's too much to do and not enough time to it.

rainbow kirby

I'd be similar to you, OP. I don't really have much in the way of side projects. I read a good bit, play around with things when I want to... but I'd rather get out on my bike or out for a run after work in the evening than crack into working on an open source project.

youcancallmeal

You see a lot of job specs these days (Almost exclusively American companies) that have those silly descriptions like they want their programmers to eat, sleep, breath code! It really winds me up because I've worked with people who would match that description and from my experience they are a nightmare to do any kind of collaborative work with, in most cases I suspect they usually have at least a mild form of aspergers. They are pretty rare though, the vast majority of programmers I've met are just normal people like you who happily only look at code in work and get on just fine in their careers.

markpb

Before I had a child to soak up all my free time, I did some dev work at night. The only problem was that I couldn't think of anything to develop and didn't see any open source projects that looked interesting (to me) so I usually ended up doing work for my employer, usually unapproved projects that I thought might be interesting. Now I don't have that problem, I'm happy just to curl up in bed and wait for my sleep to be interrupted.

Colonel Panic

I know quite a few people with a wife and kids who still have time for side projects and freelance work, but I can definitely put in more hours than them whenever the hell I feel like it.

Sometimes I don't code my side projects for months, but if I get a few evenings and weekends I'll make great progress and learn more. None of my projects are on public facing source repositories though. Your Github is not a CV, and tbh, I don't think I'd want anyone to see some my early commits, let alone their profanity laden commit messages!

I don't think it's something that is the hallmark of a good developer. I've seen a few lousy developers chip away at successful side projects in my day.

When it comes to who I'd here, I think I prefer to deal with people who *get* development, who peek behind the curtains of frameworks, who ask questions about why things happen, who don't have silly hangups about code.

And before anyone dismisses this as impossible to identify quickly, I disagree. That's what technical tests and evaluating an interviewee's questions is for.

CreepingDeath

In my younger days I used to work on a few pet projects that interested me.
I still have one or two I could potentially promote to open source projects just to have on my CV.

But when you get to your 40's you've a lot less free time with family etc.

I think developers who write code for themselves are rare, and it's those developers who make it up the management chain and want to hire like-minded people.

COYW

I build some small applications in my own time but my training and relaxation takes priority over them. Spending all evening coding after a full day at work is going to lead to fatigue and mistakes the next day. I don't agree with the American view that a real coder should have side projects on the go.

The_B_Man

I code at home.
I'm early in my career though. The reason I code outside of work is to get exposure to languages, frameworks etc that I am not getting the opportunity to learn in work.
The idea behind this is that I can get a feel as early as possible about what area I enjoy coding. If something is boring, I'll move on and focus on something I enjoy. Case in point, Android development. I'm completely self taught and intend on going into that field ASAP. My current job has no mobile area so I wouldnt have been able to get to know about Android dev without side projects.
Also, if I do get an Android job, I will still make my own apps at home, whenever a new idea strikes me. I still hold onto the hope that I can develop an app that strikes gold!!!

ChRoMe

c_man wrote: »

Now don't get me wrong, I read plenty on our area day to day. But the thought of taking on tickets, defect triaging or whatever for some open source project gives me The Fear. The kind where you get when hungover and heading into work.

I've several pretty good open source contributions to a few Java crypto libs, however they all came from using the lib at work and needing to make a change. You will find that a huge amount of open source contributions are actually from people's day jobs.

ThrowinShapes

Work is pretty busy, so coding in my spare time is the only way I get to learn new things. Working on the web, things move really fast, so it's the only way I can stay on top of the latest tools and techniques.

I think I'd lose my mind if I couldn't code in my spare time, otherwise I'd be doing the same thing every day.

amen

I do some code at home, less now I have a family but if I'm coding at home its for a few reasons:

1: To learn something new such as language, feature, framework etc
2: Something to help with my other hobbies
3: To better understand a technology
4: To stay current


To me its like CPD for any other profession.

Tar.Aldarion

I wonder about this, only 1.5 years working but its all the same two languages. How can I take time to learn at home when i'm coding all day anyway? I think I need to (I mean otherwise you get stuck in future regarding what you have experience in, I barely remember doing java etc now and that was to a college level, no industry experience) but it's a bit ridiculous to come home after work exhausted and do it. Have hobbies, relaxing to do, gf etc and only have the evening to get to do anything, and work will not be my life.


Mpost people i work with don't even have a PC at home, have no interest in doing anything as they see it as a tool for their job.
However they are established and I think it might be different for a newbie such as myself. Yet i have not done any coding at home since starting a coding job.
I was wondering a lot recently whether I should be.

Sparks

Some people see it as a sign of a truly passionate developer and will hire on the basis of it.
Some people see that as a truly appalling mistake and won't hire someone who could be off trying to prep their own startup as a sideline and who might leave the company in the lurch.
Some people just think it's daft.

Myself, I do muck about with things that interest me at home, but nowhere near as much as I used to before the daddy thing. And I only did it for fun; if it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it, and if some new computer game came out that I wanted to play, I did that instead. Or went to the rifle range. Or, y'know, girls and beer and stuff. You don't get to do any of that in the day job so the idea that someone might use it as a metric for hiring strikes me as being beyond stupid and heading into downright illegal (because for anyone with a family it's tantamount to discrimination on the basis of how many dependants you have, and that's kindof up there with racism and ageism on the list of HR sins).

BrokenArrows

I develop stuff in my spare time if I get paid to do it.

However on occasion I get an idea and develop it (usually to about 90% and then get bored. lol)

My most recent decision is to develop for the chromecast dongle.
I've ordered a cheap hd tv to develop against as I cant hog the tv in the living room!

Tar.Aldarion

Sparks wrote: »

Some people see it as a sign of a truly passionate developer and will hire on the basis of it.
Some people see that as a truly appalling mistake and won't hire someone who could be off trying to prep their own startup as a sideline and who might leave the company in the lurch.
Some people just think it's daft.

Myself, I do muck about with things that interest me at home, but nowhere near as much as I used to before the daddy thing. And I only did it for fun; if it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it, and if some new computer game came out that I wanted to play, I did that instead. Or went to the rifle range. Or, y'know, girls and beer and stuff. You don't get to do any of that in the day job so the idea that someone might use it as a metric for hiring strikes me as being beyond stupid and heading into downright illegal (because for anyone with a family it's tantamount to discrimination on the basis of how many dependants you have, and that's kindof up there with racism and ageism on the list of HR sins).

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057189849
:eek:

Sparks

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057189849
:eek:

Holy stumbling ****.
And it took till post #4 to point out that it was illegal too, and #9 to cite the actual law

Calina

(that's appalling).

Back with the OP - I like coding. Sometimes I do stuff in my spare time, sometimes I don't. But I like it because it's free, I can start stuff and not finish, I can get distracted and go "ooh shiny" about some one of the items I collect obsessively (currently bottles of ink) or feck off and play with my Raspberry Pi...If coding after work because of interest to work, it sort of ceases to be fun.

I suppose it's okay to use it as a portfolio although I wouldn't necessarily want to do it with everything but I don't think it should necessarily be a requirement.

There seems - sometimes - to be this level of ownership where programming is concerned particularly in newer companies that's beyond the pale. If they don't own the photographs I take or the wipeouts I make on the water in my spare time, why should they own the code I write?

I can understand a non-compete need but that can be covered in the employment contract. Meanwhile, if I'm writing R or Python to analyse the property market in Dublin in my spare time, I can't see how someone who specialises in OS code for some device else would possibly care.

c_man

Great responses guys, glad to see I'm not the only one!


Interesting point re: job applications. To those of you who are involved in hiring, would you expect to see a github link in a cv nowadays? I've only interviewed interns so...

Sparks

Not all of use use git y'know, some of us prefer mercurial :P

not1but4

I have 3 years under my belt and I hardly ever code in my spare time. Its only when I am planning on jumping ship or I am researching something I am stuck on in work. In my last job were development wasn't my full time job I would write code to automate tasks as I enjoyed that much more than doing the mundane manual process of it.

I think it really unfair of some companies to expect you have projects done on your own time. As with 99.9% of people I do have other interests outside of programming.

If I was to do coding all day then I would never have 'eureka moment' when I have switched off my programming brain by playing sport / in the gym / another hobbie on how to solve a problem I have been stuck on.

As for these 'Real Devs' from my experience they are impossible to work on a project with.

c_man

Sparks wrote: »

Not all of use use git y'know, some of us prefer mercurial :P

SVN for life*.





*not true

Aswerty

Like a lot of you I mostly dabble in my spare time. This is mainly to learn a bit about new/different technologies. At the moment I'm doing a bit more than dabbling because I'm familiarising myself with a Linux development stack. Up to now I solely developed on the MS stack. So I'm increasing my Linux knowledge, improving my Vim skills and learning Python all at once. For me this is CPD since in the long run I'd like to move away from the MS stack completely. The more time I spend in a Linux environment the more clunky development in Windows feels.

I think having an open source/personal portfolio is always going to be an advantage because closed source/proprietary developers literally can't show off their past work to potential employers.

Boskowski

Used to do a bit when I was younger. Did a bit of Linux contributing and a few side projects.
Then I started to do a bit of contracting on the side which was much more lucrative than hobby projects.

But now I have a house and a girlfriend and I like a bit of sports and all I do these days are practical things like movie download processing batches or such.

Not enough time to work on all those interesting projects.
Plus I find once I cracked the difficult bit let it be the design or some particularly interesting implementation piece I lose interest and I don't bring things to an end where they may actually be useful or even of commercial interest.

PrzemoF

I do coding only in my spare time (100% open source, 100% GNU/Linux, I'm not a paid developer). A while ago a got an out of the blue call from a big company asking if I'm interested to work for them [*]. So "after hours" coding might be good if you want to change your career path...

[*] We agreed later during a phone interview that our expectations don't match.

P.S.
mercurial, svn, cvs, bzr and others are just a .... road to git. You'll use & love git sooner or later

IRLConor

c_man wrote: »

To those of you who are involved in hiring, would you expect to see a github link in a cv nowadays?

I haven't been involved in hiring for a while, but I would find a GitHub link useful in a bunch of circumstances.

If the code is terrible, it's a good way of justifying not hiring you. If the code is excellent I could immediately focus on the soft skills portion of the interview process. If you say you've 10 years experience and the commits are a mess (sprawling commits that change half the world at once, whitespace changes mixed with feature changes, terrible commit messages, etc) then I have a better idea about your technical maturity. If you're 18 and have no professional experience but your code looks good then I'm better placed to judge the risk of taking you on.

I wouldn't expect a GitHub profile from every candidate. That's unreasonable IMHO. Still, a well-populated stock of code you've worked on is a great resource for a potential employer.

oscarBravo

PrzemoF wrote: »

mercurial, svn, cvs, bzr and others are just a .... road to git. You'll use & love git sooner or later

git was my road to mercurial. I ain't going back.

The Corinthian

I've coded since my early teens. I continued to do so as an adult before I entered IT - it actually almost didn't enter my mind to do so until I saw a job ad and thought "I actually do this for fun. And they want to pay someone to do it?"

When I went into IT, I realized that not everyone was like this. For some like me, it was something they did for fun. A hobby. For others it was the job. This is not to suggest that either was better than the other - although often 'different' - just that not everyone was the same. And of course, it wasn't black or white - there were lots of levels of 'coding in your spare time'; from once a year to every evening.

And as my career progressed I noticed that my 'hobby' also changed. In development roles, I'd be less likely to code at home on weekends. When in management roles, the reverse was true.

So I don't think there's a simple answer, but a lot of the time it comes down to whether coding is something you would feel the 'need' to do at home in the first place and also whether this 'need' is already filled by your professional life.

Calina

The Corinthian wrote: »

And as my career progressed I noticed that my 'hobby' also changed. In development roles, I'd be less likely to code at home on weekends. When in management roles, the reverse was true.

This doesn't surprise me as I've had a similar realisation regarding the fun element of coding and it's colouring some of my decisions for the future.

Dave!

I think that (some) employers just like to see some indicator that you're enthusiastic about and interested in writing software. Contributions to open source projects is a pretty clear indicator and it's handy for them to be able to see your code, etc., too if they like. But I've seen others ask for personal projects, StackOverflow answers, forums that you contribute to, blogs that you read, etc. I don't think that coding in the evenings necessarily means anything—I've had experience of good and bad developers who do this—but I'd be skeptical of someone who doesn't take any interest in the industry outside of 9am–5pm.

I have other hobbies too, and a life, but I do usually have some sort of project on the go that I work on in the evenings or whenever I get a rush of inspiration (e.g. I randomly hacked together a new website between last night and this afternoon, and am currently waiting for the IEDR to approve my domain! ). One of the main reasons why I'm interested in programming, and why I'm happy I chose this career, is that I have lots of my own ideas and lots of things that I want to build, and so I find it empowering to be able to take an idea and at least build a prototype from start to finish. Hopefully some day I'll do a good one and end up making a living out of it. That's the dream!

As a side-benefit of working on personal projects, it does give me something to talk about during interviews, and I've spoken at length about them before. That's not the reason I do them though.

FWIW I've made no contributions to any open source projects. I've just never seen one that sticks out as particularly interesting (nor have I looked for one, though). I'm also a bit greedy, and so when I'm working on something I would be more often thinking "how can I turn this into a business?" rather than "how can I make the world a better place?" Not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course.

Sparks

"In the name of love" is a rather interesting read in this context. It does rather effectively point out some of the downsides of the DWYL philosophy... and it's an odd enough circumstance when both the airy-fairy left-wing-pinko-commie-hippies and the hard-nosed-charge-by-the-hour-I-work-for-a-living-sonnie types amongst us are both opposed to the same thing for the same reasons, that it's definitely worth thinking critically about for a while.

run_Forrest_run

amen wrote: »

I do some code at home, less now I have a family but if I'm coding at home its for a few reasons:

1: To learn something new such as language, feature, framework etc
2: Something to help with my other hobbies
3: To better understand a technology
4: To stay current


To me its like CPD for any other profession.

this is exactly the same for myself. Never mind those companies who expect you to be eating and sleeping coding, they are looking for code monkeys and I would always steer clear of them. Places like that thrive on keeping the pressure on the development layers while they spend time protecting their backs when things go wrong.

When it comes to outside work hours coding etc I think it's more important that you are 'thinking' and not necessarily coding. A good developer does most of the work in their head, whether this be high level design work or just general thinking "what if..." or "how about.." scenarios.

That is why if I spend time doing anything development related stuff outside of work hours it's usually reading, observing tech trends, identifying patterns and trying to spot improvements or missed tricks etc.

I've been coding now for 15 years so the less time I spend hunched over a desk the better...oh and find a good physio

Calina

I found that article interesting for a few reasons, specifically because a key component sometimes of the "you love" side of things is a lot of autonomy over what you are doing.

I like solving problems, I like writing code. But some problems I hate, and may god forgive me but I hope I never again have to deal with Java in my life. It just isn't my cup of tea, language wise.

The point I would raise is that the vast majority of people who program for a living have very little autonomy over what they are programming and I'm pretty sure that not one person in a billion, at the age of 16 says, you know I'd really like to maintain poorly designed, undocumented, mission critical server software for my life because. man, THAT'S WHAT I LOVE. The point is, someone still has to maintain the legacy code and that's not always the most endearing activity...

Personally I wanted to program rocketships although that didn't go according to plan either.

How many people just read code by the way? Not by way of a code review or a preliminary review before making some change but just straight read it to get a feel for what it does, how well it was written and how it solves its underlying problems? It's not something I've often had time for although I did a little more in recent months for various reasons.

run_Forrest_run

Calina wrote: »

..and may god forgive me but I hope I never again have to deal with Java in my life. It just isn't my cup of tea, language wise.

at the risk of throwing this off topic...why??? I'd love to know. And what is your language of choice?

Calina

If you haven't read this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ie/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

My way of solving problems doesn't really align all that well with OOP as it is implemented in Java and my key complaint is that it's verbose and not always efficient. I recognise that it's one of the most common languages in use at the moment (albeit occasionally justified with "and it allows people to more effectively manage codebases involving work from mediocre programmers" which strikes me as lacking in aspiration"). But mostly, read Steve Yegge's post above.

I like Python and Javascript although I've spent most of my time writing assembler. I use R for some stats stuff as well now too. Mainly, if I need to get something done, any of the three of those will cooperate. I have not found a problem I need to solve that would be more effectively done using Java.

When it comes to programming in my own time, that's going to impact on my decision every time; something that I actually like using.

youcancallmeal

Calina wrote: »

If you haven't read this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ie/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

Uggh I got a few paragraphs in and found the way it is written tortuous to read. Any chance of a summary?

Sparks

youcancallmeal wrote: »

Uggh I got a few paragraphs in and found the way it is written tortuous to read. Any chance of a summary?

*heh* I see what you did there

Calina

youcancallmeal wrote: »

Uggh I got a few paragraphs in and found the way it is written tortuous to read. Any chance of a summary?

Java is tortuous to read. :-)

mrkite77

Calina wrote: »

I like coding. Sometimes I do stuff in my spare time, sometimes I don't. But I like it because it's free, I can start stuff and not finish

Are you me? I'm much the same.

I've been programming professionally for a long time now. I work on my own projects sometimes, but I'll also go months at a time without doing any programming outside of work.

One nice thing about programming outside of work is that code will stick around.

The stuff I write for work is very ephemeral. It's not opensource and a lot of it is only for internal corporate use. That means that when the code is no longer in use, it often gets lost forever.

The stuff I write for fun, on the other hand, can often be found on the internet.

Here's an example:

http://pastebin.com/kJm61Nrc

That's my entry in a programming competition I did back in 1996. The program is pointless, it won't even run outside of dosbox these days, and it's of little interest to anyone but me, but I'm glad I found it on some old ftp site a couple of years ago.