51–60 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention things like Orcs & Elves, and Wolf3D for the iPhone. Carmack is a really bad example here!
I'm not sure you can count those as side projects (the games, not the aerospace company, which is a side project -- but it is an actual company!). Those are products shipped by some of the biggest publishers in the world. That would be like someone at MS saying that their side project was a new feature in Word.
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…
What about the auxiliary scripts that need to be written for some tasks to automate some task that is ancillary to your product? If you are writing a ruby script for those tasks that are useful but could be done by brute force methods I don't see a problem with that. 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…
Pfft.
Any semi conservative workplace, anywhere: "What? No, who the hell would maintain it? Stick to ."
Although I like to think I'm a bit cooler and down with the times and the hip words the kids use would probably say something like, "So help me god, if I have to learn Erlang at three in the morning to fix some bullshit you cobbled together I will fucking end you".
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,…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure you can count those as side projects (the games, not the aerospace company, which is a side project -- but it is an actual company!). Those are products shipped by some of the biggest publishers in the world. That would be like someone at MS saying that their side project was a new feature in Word.
[deleted]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's not how a side project is typically defined. Again, if I did a new feature in IBM DB2 that took me a day, would you consider it a side project?
[deleted]
So what is a "side project" and when people ask you questions in an interview like, "what are some of your side projects?", what are they asking?
They're not asking what did you ship as part of a corporate entity in most cases. They want to know, specifically what did you do outside the context of your job. If you work for EA, its hard to claim that an EA game is your side project. Just like someone at MS isn't likely to claim that a new Word feature is their side project, even if they did all the coding for it over the weekend.
And if he ported Emacs to the iPhone that would be a side project, by most measures. He'd have to release the code since its GPLed and ID is not likely to sell it.
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,…
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,…
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.
So try follow your passion. If your passion is to write a novel, play guitar, do that. If your passion is to build a new web app, do that. Don't code just for the sake of coding. You cannot lie to yourself.