I keep reading about software developers who sleep every night and work 8 hour days. Both are completely foreign concepts to me.
Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
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Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#72Partner, 2 kids, full time job. I get home, play with the kids, wash them and put them to bed. I usually work on side projects most evenings and spend an evening or two a week with my SO.
I usually budget 3 - 4 nights a week to side projects.
I saved most of my time by choosing to work remote/close-to-home. I don't make as much as some of my friends who live in the big city or out on the West coast. However I get to wake up at a reasonable hour, walk my kids to school, and stop by the café on my way to work to catch up on the local gossip.
From about 8 - 11, 3... sometimes 4 nights a week I work on my side projects. I used to do more open source stuff but right now I'm working on a book [0] and testing the waters with a GraphQL service [1]. I've also committed myself to recording one, short, album a month.
It sounds like a lot but I guess being a parent I've learned to juggle and be effective with what little time I have. I tend to pre-plan my activities and force them into habits, rituals that sort of thing.
Some days I'm too exhausted. But that's ok. Take a little time off and go to bed early.
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tnx for suggestion. I did a change. More like it or do you have any concrete suggestion about font?
Definitely better. Next suggestion would be to decrease spacing between each header and its details below, as well as minimize the number of font sizes you have (your by line and your tags lines are 1.5em and 1.6em, your header is another size and it also differs from the number size on the left of it). These things are more stylistic design choices, whereas the font type was definitely a usability concern. Personall…
Agree with these. You can hire a freelance designer for fairly cheap and it makes a huge difference.
I think adding a visual separator between sections would help too, along with maker search/header/post-cta a little bigger:
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#74Your biggest problem is your 2 hour commute. Move closer to work or find a job closer to your house and you'll have a huge increase in free time and energy.
Agree. Change what you can control, at least start there.
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#75Yep. That's why when you reach this milestone, you ain't care about the name of a company, if the product is hot or not. All you care about are
- ability to work from home
- not too competitive environment (otherwise you'd get put aside by young people)
- good health coverage
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#76I have three young kids. My experience has been: 1) sleep (a normal amount, not extra) 2) being an OK parent 3) a house that is almost always fairly clean 4) side projects/learning 5) friends 6) a relationship with your partner/spouse that's doing OK 7) actual solo leisure time Pick four . :-/ [EDIT] Oh, and "staying halfway in shape" comes out of your "actual solo leisure time" hours or possibly "friends" hours if y…
I pick 7777
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#77Of course it affects my life. Now obviously the rest of the day and most of the weekend is either spend at work or home with my son (he is 3, so still needs more attention than older kids).
On the other side, I was never really into side projects in the evenings, simply because I needed that time to cool off and relax a bit. Without that time I would quickly burn out. The best is (and if you can) is to make your "side project" your day job.
The question is still if it actually affected me as a developer in the sense that I can not do the work anymore? No, it did not. I leave work earlier but that's pretty much it. I don't feel less productive than before. Actually I even think I am more productive since the time is more limited. It is all about what you make of it I believe.
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#78Some nights I work on something else from 8/9pm to 11pm/12am. Other nights I recover. Weekends are tough to get time.
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#79Try to get rid of the commute. That's two wasted hours every day. I have a similar 1hour commute but I only need to be in the office 1 day a week. On the other 4 days I get up at the same time (5:30-6:00am) and I work on my side projects until 8am when I bring my daughter to school and my home-work day starts.
> Try to get rid of the commute. That's two wasted hours every day. I'm not OP, but I have a ~45 minute commute in New York city on the subway. It's one of the places where I can actually relax, read a book, listen to a podcast, and nobody needs me for anything . (I'd loathe it if I had to drive, though.)
Yeah, one job entailed a 1hr ride on the commuter rail each way. I could read a book again!
Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?
#80I have 10 kids, soon to be 11, and I homeschool.
So... that's how open source projects go to die, and the major reason why I no longer maintain procps. This was painful, but family comes first.
The concept of "quality time" is broken. You can't squeeze life into a few spare moments here and there, and you mostly can't schedule it. You have to live it, being there for the skinned knees that can happen at any moment. There is no substitute for being available.
Side projects are limited to things that can be done with kids. That changes as they grow.
Studying new technology is something I can do at work. I help invent it actually, and I dig into a wide variety of things, so that's fine. Maybe it is different for web developers; ouch if that is the case. I do low-level stuff.
A big difference is that I don't live or work in a "proper" city and haven't since I got married. I tend to live in the sort of place that is borderline big enough for a commercial airport, with perhaps 33,000 to 100,000 people at a density that is well below anything in the Bay Area. This lets me afford to live near work, and it means that there is little traffic. By car, my worst 1-way commute was 15 minutes. It's now about 3 minutes.
Compared to your hour-long commute, that 3 minutes is pretty much a rounding error. It's like I get an extra 10 hours of life per week. You have at most 4 hours for family on weekdays. Imagine if you had 6 hours instead.
I get that big-city life has more entertainment, but you don't seem to have time to take advantage of it.