> I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job while not annoying your employer. How did you manage it?

I ran my company (https://buttondown.email/) as a side project for ~three or so years before taking it full time and it was _similarly_ in a position where I could get paged for downtime or plumbing-related issues. My suggestions:

1. Honestly, choose a project where downtime or operational issues are less prevalent. This is a cop-out answer, but when you're evaluating potential projects it should be top of mind.

2. Be very up-front and honest with yourself and your employer about your commitments and your priorities. My personal rule was to only ever look at Buttondown-related stuff outside of what I considered my "core" working hours unless I was getting paged, and even then responding to pages would wait until my meetings or time-sensitive work was finished.

3. Set a schedule and rely on the schedule. For me this ended up being "side project hours are from 7-9pm M-F and 3-8pm Sat"; at times I wanted to do more and at times I wanted to do less, but the former path leads to burnout and the latter path leads to languishing.