Meh, I agree in general and believe in work/life balance but you don’t need a huge side project. Just take a few scripts written already, write a readme, and an hour a year per script tuning them up and adding tests. Maybe a code golf problem or two. In short, if you can’t find four hours a year to put into your career, maybe you just aren’t interested. I think of it as page two of my resume.
This has to be one of the best comments I've seen on this whole issue. Way too many devs seem to think it's a massive undertaking and they need a giant project. Hiring engineers don't even want to go through 100000 lines of code (they have lives as well!). Even starting by uploading your dot files is something and takes all of 10 minutes (with the added bonus of having them available if you need to switch machines).