31–40 of 156 posts
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,…
Regarding your post though, i think that no one is assuming extremes - you can easily manage a few hours a month to do some mad science experiments. You might even surprise yourself with the outcome or renew your passion that made you take up development in the first place.
You also don't always get the full perspective in your day job - even if you work at an amazing place.
Development isn't a music skill. It isn't about repeating a piece over and over to train your mind, motor skills, and dexterity until you can reproduce it perfectly.
Every day people are pouring tons of new and interesting ideas into this discipline and more often than not, they have excellent ideas which can be shared and studied to your benefit. Take advantage of it.
Unless you have a super-awesome job (and lots of people do), programming in your own time may be the only way to discover and play with new things. If you work backend at a C# shop but would like to start writing Ruby, you're unlikely to get the opportunity to learn unless you do it in side projects. Practically, you may be totally happy in your current niche, but you're at higher risk from technological obsolescence…
Automation of deployment or some menial task, sanitizing test data, gleaning statistics from a csv dump of the database, cron jobs, etc... I'm sure you could come up with more.
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Just about sums it all up
Most developers I know - in real life - don't program in their spare time, never mind going to conferences or evening meet ups. If you work as a developer and your hobby is developing then there's a good chance that you'll burn out. That's not to say that it is bad for people who do it, just try to expand your hobbies to something outside of technology.
People are allowed to have more than one hobby. And I'd think that if your paid job is writing and maintaining boring internal enterprise apps, hacking on fun projects could prevent you from getting burned out.
I mentioned to someone that in my spare time I made iPhone games. They asked, "as a hobby or you trying to make money?" I replied that sure, I'd like to make a few bucks. He said to me "If you let your hobby become your job, what will you do for a hobby then?" At that point, I realized that making a distinction between a hobby and a career path is a good move, and you have to know what you are pursuing. For example,…
I get it, you should be free to enjoy your hobby without money clouding your thinking. Totally agree with that. On the other hand, I think a hobby that could be something more is totally legit. For instance, I am learning Haskell as a hobby. I'm not really sold on it as a great language for business (yet), but I realize that if I get good enough at it I may be able to shift my career in that direction. To answer the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Linus cooking up Git - that's not a side project; that's what he does for earning a living. They needed Git as a replacement for BitKeeper. I do admire Linus, when he sets his mind on something, he gets things done. But, about people working for big companies, since you are talking about iOS / WebOS, etc... these people do many times have side projects, but they are internal and in the context of the company they wor…
these people do many times have side projects, but they are internal and in the context of the company they work for, not public
I don't think most ppl would consider them side projects, at least not in the discussions ppl typically have. For example, I've seen people say that it literally has to be on GitHub.
I am a research mathematician. I work hard, but I also spend a lot of time pursuing other interests such as yoga, swing dancing, and improv comedy. This takes away from the time I do math. Does this make me less of a mathematician? Of course it does. This is a tautology. I am a mathematician to the extent which I devote my time and energy to learning and doing math. Sometimes I feel guilty about this, but on reflecti…
I once heard the terms "T Person" and "I Person" as ways to represent a person's skills (though I don't find any info on it with any Google searches; maybe I'll write about it someday).
An I Person is someone whose skills are very narrow (vertical). This person is a specialist and probably spends the majority of his/her time perfecting that skill.
A T Person is someone who also has a predominant skill, but it's perhaps not as deep as an I Person. However, a T Person has a horizontal bar that stretches across a range of skills.
I don't recall hearing about a "- (Dash) Person", but if I were to continue this analogy, that would be a jack of all trades, master of none.
Society needs all types of people, but I suspect T People are especially desirable in a startup. You want a person who can do a little of everything, but excels in one particular area.
EDIT: Found a reference to this concept - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills
And a lot of them are good at what they do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Carmack has a side gig running an aerospace company which includes coding all the control systems and telemetry. Some devs are just prolific.