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Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

forbes.com

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Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#21

Post by xutopia »

jobu wrote: post #20

My kids are my side projects. I used to be worried about how they affected my career, but three years ago a bicycle accident put me in the hospital for a week and I completely reevaluated my life. It's a little sad (and a bit of a cliché) that it took nearly dying to realize their importance, but now I just smile and think about my kids when someone talks about their amazing project.

A friend of mine died in the last year from cancer. He was in his 30s. I too replaced a lot of the time I spent hacking to spend with my family. I like side projects but I love my family.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#22

Post by zach »

Jgrubb wrote: post #4

Is Forbes really scraping content from Quora and presenting it as an article?

Forbes and Quora have an arrangement to republish content from Quora that's interesting to Forbes readers.

The authors are asked individually if they want their answers to appear on Forbes and receive no compensation.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#23

Post by chadwickthebold »

Jgrubb wrote: post #4

Is Forbes really scraping content from Quora and presenting it as an article?

It's not entirely slimy. Its a great way to drive traffic for both Forbes and Quora. How many people would have read this opinion if Forbes hadn't made it slightly more high-profile? Ars has been doing a similar feature-series for awhile, and I think its one of the best parts of their site:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/how-ea...

I will give you that the Ars series is edited much much better than this one-off from Forbes

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#24

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work. You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas. If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why do…

> If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be.

This is simply not true. Some developers will improve the more they code under the right circumstances. Others are sort of like the person at the gym who has bad form that, for one reason or another, is never corrected. For this person, more exercise is actually detrimental.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#25

Post by epoxyhockey »

eterm wrote: post #10
Jgrubb wrote: post #4

Is Forbes really scraping content from Quora and presenting it as an article?

This struck me also. I initially thought "blimey, does HN provide them so much traffic that they're linkbaiting them now", but taking Quora content and repackaging it is just even lower. It particularly struck me that HN very recently had an article that kicked off this exact debate. What a sad state of affairs, although the full advert splash and the junky "similar" articles give that impression too.

Forbes has been linkbaiting HN for at least 73 days (the time when I first cared to comment about it).

Our clicks are providing positive reinforcement for Forbes' blogspam and I'm surprised that HN hasn't banned forbes.com yet.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#26

Post by a-priori »

I'm a developer who does take on side projects. I have two on the go right now, plus I'm the technical reviewer for an upcoming book. Yet, I agree with this entirely. I think it's silly to expect a "good" developer to code in their spare time, just like it would be silly to expect any other occupation to do so.

Instead, it should be like a carpenter that does their own home renovations, or an accountant who uses double-entry book-keeping for their personal finances: they're using their work skills in their personal lives. That's like a developer who makes up a tool to keep track of errands in their house, for example.

Or, it should be like a technical writer or copy writer who writes short stories in their spare time. That's like an application developer who writes games in their spare time.

In none of these cases would you think that an carpenter who hires professionals or an accountant who just does normal budgeting and so on or a writer who writes only at work must be bad at their jobs. Why should it be any different with programming?

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#27

Post by mrexroad »

jobu wrote: post #20

My kids are my side projects. I used to be worried about how they affected my career, but three years ago a bicycle accident put me in the hospital for a week and I completely reevaluated my life. It's a little sad (and a bit of a cliché) that it took nearly dying to realize their importance, but now I just smile and think about my kids when someone talks about their amazing project.

agree x10. tragically, it took losing one of my children to realize that the extra hours and time management i put into balancing parenting w/ startup-life should have just been put into spending more time w/ my kids.

i'm currently back at a far less exciting enterprise job, and made it to every baseball game this year even though they started at 5pm. you only get one short chance at being their hero, so better make the most of it.

i haven't coded on the side in a long time, but look forward to doing so soon w/ my oldest now going into 1st grade. whatever i code will be for/with them.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#28

Post by jt2190 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work. You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas. If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why do…

  > You will make more money if you have an active github 
  > account.
I highly doubt this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

There's also a downside with sharing too much information about yourself without being present to answer questions or provide more context: It lets an employer discount you as a potential candidate simply because of their misunderstanding of your work.

As evidence, refer to the "n projects on github have SQL injection security flaws" articles that show up here occasionally. But we all know that when you're just hacking around on something for fun, you might write code like this. The point of your project might have been to quickly demonstrate something cool, yet it can be used to demonstrate that you lack security awareness (even if that's not actually true.)

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#29

Post by zecho »

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work. You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas. If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why do…

I hear this quite often about Github and it's a bit disturbing to me. If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.

I can't be the only person on Github that uses it primarily as a junk drawer full of bad implementations and abandoned "projects" that were more quick and dirty personal itches. Sometimes I'll contribute to random OSS, but the vast majority of GH for me is just a place to store random ideas, many of which were just toying around with some new tool or whatever and would never see the light of day in production without given much more thought.

Honestly, if you want to see code samples, you're probably better off watching the person work through a problem. Give prospective hires a project. Whether its as simple as fizzbuzz or as difficult as a trial week is up to you, I suppose.

Re: Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

#30

Post by applecore »

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work. You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas. If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why do…

> You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work.

This can't be true if you count all the programmers working in the financial industry.

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