Ask HN: Do all techies have a huge list of pet projects?
blog.rabidgremlin.com
blog.rabidgremlin.com
I do not consider myself atypical in this. Most coders I know, at least those who are passionate about their work, are similar. No matter where you stand on the "hackers and painters" thing, it should be acknowledged that in this respect both are similar. Most painters have hundreds of test canvasses lying around, with stuff that will never be seen by the world -- it is how they hone thier skills.
I think "nerd-dom" in general has lots of people like this. The arduino crowd all have lots of toys. The steampunk kids are the same. Looking over to the nerdier bits of shop class is not much different -- seems like everyone makes a paintball tank these days (and to get to that level usually is by route of a shop full of failed experiments, potato cannons, a home-made scooter, and so on)
I had to look that up: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=prolly
I understand the mentality that draws people to try new things, experiment with new technologies, and learn different ways of doing things they've previously struggled with. Personally, I don't have any side projects anymore. All of my effort goes into my job, simply because the challenges that I face at work are more complex, more demanding, and more interesting than anything I can reasonably hope to accomplish at home. If a problem is truly hard, I don't think I can solve it in 2 hrs/week, and if it is interesting enough that I think it is valuable to solve, I will try to find a way to integrate it into my work.
My tone here is probably harsher than it needs to be, but it's in reaction to the tone of the title and the self-congratulatory responses I expected to find ("at least those who are passionate ... are similar"). A certain type of techie has a huge list of pet projects, but there are people at the other end of the spectrum. Call them researchers, as opposed to builders, and they want to solve abstract problems with no immediate use or UI. Their interesting problems, like data mining, hardware scaling, and distributing programming, are a lot harder to do on the side than creating a Rails/Google Earth/Yelp mashup, but not necessarily because of the absolute difficulty of the problem. The former problems only exist when you have a lot of resources already invested in a project, and trying to investigate them on the weekends is much less rewarding than learning Haskell. Ultimately, I find that these at-scale problems are the ones I'm interested in, so I don't come home and code in my free time. I just stay at work for 12 hours a day.
It's certainly an artifact of being engaged in your job, but I think that should make it even more clear that all techies do not have a huge list of pet projects. Having one is certainly not a necessary condition of talent or passion.
Life is short enough as it is, so I don't want to spend 50% of it at work (more if you count the hours you spend sleeping). After a week of working "overtime", I feel mentally exhausted. It completely ruins my Saturday, so that's more of my life that is wasted.
I do have some pet projects that I work on sometimes. Even if I could integrate it into my work, I won't do it unless it directly affects my work. My work ethic is strong, and I always look for ways to improve the systems during work hours. But there is a limit to what I will do.
If my ideas does not interest my work place enough to include them in my work schedule, I will use them in my side projects. Giving away free overtime to solve problems that my work doesn't think is worth paying me for is not an option.
phil:~$ ls ~/proj -F|grep "/"|wc -l
100
$ ls ~/project | wc -l
62
I've met people who don't have such things and are still competent, but not terribly commonly.
Some of us have interesting resumes.
Further, if I am interested in doing X then I find a way to do that professionally.
In fact with some teams I have worked with, if we interviewed a tech person who did not have any side projects we often viewed them with suspicion.
I think side-projects are a decent proxy for curiosity and industriousness, which I try very hard to evaluate when interviewing candidates. However, my line of questioning for this has to do with what complaints people have with their tools and what they have done to overcome them -- this shows a similar desire to have internally-motivated programming tasks and a desire for understanding more than simple project requirements.
As for the post -- the question asked if everyone had a such a large list of pet projects. Your answer seems to be yes too. Sure you dont publish it, but you try to do new projects and methods at work -- pet projects are pet projects, whether at work or home.
Also, keeping around "throwaway" code has helped me more than not -- I can find some half remembered example and be using the concept way quicker than trying to come up with it again.