There is one thing that is extremely important for me as a developer that I cannot really do at work: reinventing the wheel.<p>My GitHub is full of wheel reinventions (TCP load balancer, B+tree index, monitoring daemon...). No employer would have paid for me to develop these projects, and yet I learned so many invaluable skills by doing them.<p>I'm happy to invest my free time this way because I feel that I develop myself, but keeping a healthy balance is hard. I've noticed that I can keep working on a side-project after work for a few weeks until starting to feel burnt-out, losing motivation for both work and the side-project.
On a related note, it's probably also worth pointing out that:<p>A: The majority of people in the tech industry are indeed like this. They go to work, build sites/programs/apps for eight hours or so and go home to relax. The percentage you saw doing tech envagelism on Twitter or hosting conferences or heading up open source projects or posting on Reddit or Hacker News all the time are a minority of the population, and you're not a failure or 'strange' if you're not like that.<p>B: Even if you didn't have enough time to build up your knowledge while working, 90% of companies that need developers don't need cutting edge technology. Most people aren't working at Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/whatever.
Common counter-argument is "but how will you learn the skills you need", but actually it's perfectly possible to learn everything you need on the job.<p>Julia Evans has nice list of how people learn at work: <a href="https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/08/06/learning-at-work/" rel="nofollow">https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/08/06/learning-at-work/</a><p>And e.g. I feel work is best place to learn new programming languages: <a href="https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/09/learn-a-new-programming-language/" rel="nofollow">https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/09/learn-a-new-programm...</a>
While not terribly experienced with hiring, I have found that asking about coding outside of work is a convenient proxy for two reasons:<p>- If you hobby code open source, this often offers me my only real opportunity to see first hand how you code and how you run a project and how you interact with people.<p>- But really, I don’t care about coding. I care about finding people who are passionate about building things and thinking, and who can express themselves well. Can you express the challenges and interests of what you love, whatever this is?<p>Still, I worry that this may result in me only hiring people like myself.
This whole spare time coding, public repository pressure, and interview coding assignments are the reson why the industry is spitting out burned out people before they reach 35 and why the communities are so hysterical.
I am at "I only code" at work person. I dont even have a desk at home. Luckily our work enviorment encourages new techonolgies and skills. I use my off time not to code, but to teach, draw etc. These are skills I see also compliment coding, improving all the supporting skills that are nessecary to be a good dev.
One side of this I haven't seen, people like me, entirely code for work, but also work a lot. I work 60-80 hours a week (even more!), so that doesn't leave much time for coding on the outside.<p>Why? Because I really love what I do. I find the problems interesting, and I am trying to push my career further and bonus higher.<p>When I go home, I often take the time commuting and at night to read research, run, maybe read or experiment more, but that is mostly just out of habit.<p>I tried to do little bit on github before, but it sits there, dated looking abandoned. I was seriously thinking of deleting it, but i don't know if that would look even worse.