Protect your shed

Which is unfair of course. A) I don’t even know whether it was actually was written by AI and B) even if it was, it still encapsulates a human’s potentially worthwhile thoughts and experiences.

But.. undeniably genAI will lead to a much greater volume of text being written so we’ll all have to be even more selective in what we read and what not?

For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.

> You try something in the shed on a weekend because you’re curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the documentation doesn’t tell you. Then months later, when the team at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you’re not starting from zero.

These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.

Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do something useful.

My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of my own.

Be careful of calling this an ideal employee.

I, for example, tend to have a little bit of such a schedule, but what I work on at home is so much more exciting, making the job much more frustrating in comparison. Also, one is typically not allowed (or it is not possible) to apply all the really good ideas that one tested/implemented for the home projects at work.

Thus, the kind of employees who apply such a pattern are often very, very passionate about programming - but this kind of passion often makes them

- more frustrated at work (i.e. they might be cynical),

- less subservient (they often know better - from their "night work" - that a requirement makes no sense, and may be vocal about it),

- very opinionated about their "technological taste", not necessarily fitting the technological taste that the employer would love to see in the work (they have seen a lot more programming techniques).