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Side projects

antirez.com

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Re: Side projects

#211

Post by AznHisoka »

bottled_poe wrote: post #196
seestheday wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well. At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time. A part of the "playing" that I do with him is buildin…

I don't mean to offend, but have you considered what your child might think of you when they grow a bit older and find this comment?

They'll probably thank him for raising him well, and teaching him/her the value of a good work ethic, rather than being spoiled and lazy.

Re: Side projects

#212

Post by ctrlrsf »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

I'm in the same boat. All programming effort was for work and no time for side projects. Until recently. I've started making projects open source by default and committing something at least once a day no matter how insignificant. This has kept my motivation going and hard to find an excuse not to fix or add this one little bug or feature. README file clearly states its alpha work in progress so others know what to expect. Something about putting your work out there that makes you want to maintain and improve upon.

Good luck, start small, make a few commits.

Oh, and if not open source software, try getting minimum product out so you can feel that sense of obligation to improve and develop further

Re: Side projects

#213

Post by jmgtan »

My situation is getting bad enough that even my wife is complaining that I don't spend enough time with them (her and my son). I have a full time job with SAP, I also have regular consulting work on my own which I have been doing since I graduated from university, and lately I've started working on a number of products that I strongly believe in.

I've started applying a bit of scrum in my own work where in I have a Trello board with my backlog, my plan for the current sprint, what is done and what is deployed (for demo). This allows me to focus and not jump around developing endless streams of features. I set a side a chunk of time (w/ adequate negotiations with my wife) where in I blitz through my tasks for the current sprint. It also helps that my wife is a project manager in her day job so she understands my Trello board.

I find that this setup is the most effective for me, of course YMMV. For my consulting work I normally have 1 ongoing project at a time and usually a few in the RFP type of stage where in I'm still in discussions with clients.

Re: Side projects

#214

Post by tjr »

r00fus wrote: post #154
TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. This. That's the primary reason I keep eating unhealthy. Since I started working, I naturally gravitated toward few dishes that basically make themselves - e.g. french fries, boiled/fried sausage, etc. - basically anything I can drop on the stove and leave unatte…

I would strongly recommend slow cookers. You can leave it in the morning and get it in the evening. The recipes are straightforward and require little actual cooking knowledge. Even better you can easily cook large quantities so you're not even cooking every day. My healthy favorite is slow-cooked stew combined with rice-cooker brown rice/quinoa - both are set on timers so they finish just before we get home - so no…

I make a slow-cooker vegetable soup: low-sodium V8 juice with whatever chopped vegetables and beans I feel like / have on hand, typically kidney beans, carrot, onion, mushroom, bok choy, garlic ...

It takes me about a half-hour to chop up the vegetables, but one round makes a lot of soup.

Re: Side projects

#215

Post by makeset »

maaku wrote: post #174
bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

I did the quit and focus thing. It ended up working out, but just barely. I was underwater for a while and my marriage about to fall apart.. I'm not sure I'd recommend the same path even though it did have a happy ending (co-founder of a well funded startup, a cash bonus that wiped out my worst debt, and my wife and I are back on good terms). Wish I had better advice, but it is a hard problem. If you only have 3-5 ho…

That sounded like your wife was going to leave you because you were underwater doing what you wanted, and she changed her mind because you were solvent again. If that's case, assuming you already knew the kind of person you were married to, the quit-and-focus option was quite a gamble. I'm glad it paid out.

Re: Side projects

#216

Post by prawn »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

Are you in a position to negotiate four days/week with your employer?

Re: Side projects

#217

Post by lfowles »

joshdotsmith wrote: post #160
smackfu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few services now that deliver a box of ingredients and recipes for $60 or so a week for three meals. Plated, HelloFresh, BlueApron. They really helped us actually cook more, instead of talking about it. It still takes time (30-40 min per meal) but you do learn cooking techniques and you do eat much healthier. And while it seems expensive, we probably go out one less night a week because of it, saving $60…

The pain of going to buy ingredients is a big one for people. I just can't personally see myself spending that on much ingredient delivery, though my wife does get some things delivered from a CSA. I think there are two other pains wrapped up in why people buy from these services: meal planning and instruction. Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of th…

> Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air.

Ding ding ding, this is why I subscribe to emeals, there's so much "science" out there about what a meal should be composed of that I'd much rather not deal with it. It's easier to see 14 dinners and choose 7 rather than scout out recipes on my own (resulting in hours lost per week).

As far as instruction, I prefer having the small set of recipes from the service, because it gives me cooking breadth that I would otherwise have not bothered with. As I start encountering meals with similar preparation again and again, I can afford to see how much I can get away with playing with the recipe.

Re: Side projects

#218

Post by capisce »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

> My problem is that I have a full time job

The tyranny of the 40+ hour work week. Why is it that so few people are willing and/or able to negotiate working fewer hours in a week, for example 6 hours a day or 4 days in a week?

Is it fear of being fired for making such a request? Are the employers so powerful and the employees in such a weak bargaining position?

Or the fear of having to take a pay cut? Maybe people get used to too expensive life styles instead of keeping living frugally when the money starts rolling in. They're then in the fragile position of not being able to afford a slight reduction in income.

It's kind of sad that there is not a lot more individual variation in working hours, when people are simultaneously lamenting their lack of free time.

Re: Side projects

#219

Post by wffurr »

rday wrote: post #201
js2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small tangent, but Michael Pollan's "Cooked" makes a reasonable counter-argument. By delegating everything that we're not "most valuable" at to others, we potentially end up becoming impotent and un-informed, unable to make intelligent decisions outside our area of expertise. Thus we lose our ability to be good citizens. He specifically makes the point in the context of cooking, something he argues is so fundamenta…

I agree with that. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to learn to cook. How can I be so bad at something I do multiple times every single day? It makes you think differently. "A dash of salt, a pad of butter, cook until brown". None of that means anything to me! I've been coding my whole life. How much is a dash? What shade of brown? Obviously I'm more into baking :)

Dash=1/8 teaspoon Pad=1 teaspoon Brown=It looks tasty enough to eat

I used to get mad about the lack of precision in many recipes, but I worked through it and adopted the "would I eat it" test for doneness.

It's a matter of experience, and you only get that by doing. Having an experienced mentor can help, but is not necessary, only a willingness to experiment.

Now I embrace the imprecision because it enables creativity without fear.

Re: Side projects

#220

Post by belorn »

hastly wrote: post #16
Avalaxy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. It is one of the biggest injustices currently happening in the "rich world", but there is no easy fix. GPL?

Making everything virally GPL doesn't solve the problem of nobody paying for open source development. I actually think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult to build businesses and make money from open source software, because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project if you so chose. I think instead we need a set of incentives in which it's a terrible idea to use softwar…

> think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult ... because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project.

If everything was GPL'ed, there would not be any proprietary projects. Everything would be GPL'ed.

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