121–130 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I call BS. There's a continuous five-hour stretch between 1 AM and 6 AM when you're not being productive.
You should at least set up some script to automatically refactor your code or search for prime numbers or something during that time.
Correlation does not equal causation. Asking whether not programming in your spare time makes you a bad developer is the wrong question. The right question is, What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time? Pursue that something and you may end up programming in your spare time. Or starting a company such that your side project is your job. Or finding something really ex…
The right question is, What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time? This is a good question, but it does lead me to a thought... why does it seem like most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work appears to be side projects? Let me explain. Most of the programmers who produce large products, don't do much in the way of side projects. Ca…
It's easy to see why most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work appears to be side projects: This is a trivial consequence of the fact that the vast majority of the software developed on this planet is "dark matter." It's developed inside companies, and even if you know I work for IBM on DB2, it's hard to see from the outside whether I'm a coding machine by day or whether I write emails from 8-5 and code side projects from 5-8.
In the universe of software projects, we're mostly talking about side projects that are visible things like Github repositories, and mostly talking about day gigs that are invisible. If we want to drop the word "appears" from your first statement, we need to include side projects that aren't on Github (like startups being developed on nights and week-ends while the authors go to work "for the man" M-F 9-5).
We then need to compare all of the side projects to all of the code these people write during their day gigs, whether it's highly visible stuff like Linux or "invisible" like the internals of an ATM locator for an online bank.
If we don't include all of the side projects and we don't include all of the day gigs, it is very easy for our skewed sample to have many examples where the authors appear to do most of their work on their side projects.
Please don't assume from this that I disagree with where you seem to be taking the conversation. If we see that things are not always as they seem, we also must accept the idea that even if people with side projects appear to be good programmers, it might be that the high-profile examples we find on HN or who blog are not representative of programmers as a whole. It is very dangerous to draw conclusions about the correlation between a side project and talent based on an incomplete sample. I think we agree on this here and in another thread elsewhere.
As they say... The plural of anecdote is not "data."
I've worked with a large number of people at a large number of companies, and the difference between the solid "B" developers and the amazing "A" developers is that the amazing developers are passionate about technology and coding, and always have a side project of some sort going on. They are excited to learn new languages/frameworks/ideas and bring that added knowledge to their day job with great effect.
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That's funny. When you're 20 and just starting out you need that sort of intensive learning. When you're 30 and you're seeing the same thing with a new name for the 2nd or 3rd time it takes a lot less effort and time to keep up.
I don't think anyone needs that amount of intensive learning. Eight solid hours a day is plenty to be an expert after a couple of years.
Investing in my skillset on my own time with my own rules is an investment in me. I don't particularly care if it makes me a better programmer - it's a contingency plan to make sure I can support my family in both good times and bad.
Programming in your spare time is much less attractive when your employer claims to own all the code you write.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's funny. When you're 20 and just starting out you need that sort of intensive learning. When you're 30 and you're seeing the same thing with a new name for the 2nd or 3rd time it takes a lot less effort and time to keep up.
I don't think anyone needs that amount of intensive learning. Eight solid hours a day is plenty to be an expert after a couple of years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's funny. When you're 20 and just starting out you need that sort of intensive learning. When you're 30 and you're seeing the same thing with a new name for the 2nd or 3rd time it takes a lot less effort and time to keep up.
I don't think anyone needs that amount of intensive learning. Eight solid hours a day is plenty to be an expert after a couple of years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's funny. When you're 20 and just starting out you need that sort of intensive learning. When you're 30 and you're seeing the same thing with a new name for the 2nd or 3rd time it takes a lot less effort and time to keep up.
I don't think anyone needs that amount of intensive learning. Eight solid hours a day is plenty to be an expert after a couple of years.
A good programmer should wake up at 6 am in the morning get a solid 2.5hrs of coding done by 8:30 am, at 8:30 leave for work, work till 6 (it goes without saying that the lunchbreak must be spent trying to learn the Haskell or if you are feeling lazy answering questions on stackoverflow). Commute from 6 to 6:30 (it's a bonus if you listen to a technical podcast during this time and no stuff like TWIT does not count,…
I guess not everybody caught the irony
when i'm working a 9-5 job, the last thing i want to do is go home and program more. i'd rather throw the ball around with the dog or rock out on my guitar. in my experience the people who say "you have to have side projects to be a good developer" are either people who do program in their spare time, or people who want to hire the type of programmers who voluntarily chain themselves to their desk. this is one myth i…
Let's say you and I started writing code at the same age or time, and you code only 9-5, whereas I code an average of 15 hours a week more than that in my spare time. Two years later, I've gotten as much experience (or at least put in as many hours) as would take you >3 years to gather. Five years after we started, I'm 3 years your senior in terms of experience. It's not that you won't be a good developer if you don'…
Sure, the more time you spend practicing, you will likely be better than had you not spent that time. But to compare it across people is meaningless. There are countless numbers of those who have spent decades in the grind and aren't much better than they were when they started. Compared to someone fresh out of college who can code circles around most.
Experience itself means little, if anything at all.