Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time.
Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring corporate crap.
I don't known how all of you "homelab" people put up with it. I have enough Linux boxes at work that demand too much care and feeding.
The author has a good point but it really isn't a two-way street. The hobby stuff can feed into your career, but letting it go the other way is usually either counterproductive, or bad for your mental health.
Don't tinker in your shed because you think it'll advance your career. You'll be disappointed. Sorry for the spoiler.
Tinker in your shed because it makes you happy, and brings joy and meaning to your life. You'll be more productive and, in my experience, you'll actually be more likely to learn something useful for work.
> 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.
I have an actual shed that I spend time in, doing maintenance work, building physical items (latest one is an auto-refilling bird watering station), and making beer. Given my day job is so desk-bound, and so tech oriented, I find using my hands in my off-time to be very fulfilling and what keeps me sane.
Different strokes, as they say.
i got out of tech/coding so i could apply my skills to more real world stuff. it's been so much better. i don't make as much but i end each day with a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. i wouldn't trade it away. my social life has gotten so much better, as well, because i'm happier in general and i talk to so many more people as a result. i smile more, i think is the main thing.
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.
Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.
I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've actually done.
But when I don’t have time and frankly energy, then I still try to do _some_ minutes of this kind of thing daily.
I feel like there‘s a big difference between 0min and 15min for anything (also includes exercise, meditation etc.), and while it’s great to have more time, there are diminishing returns beyond 30/45min.
Before having built a more regular habit I was often in a sort of excitement-burnout loop. That doesn’t work well for me.
No more coding after 5pm!
Nearly all the local frame builders were using their parts, especially the rear dropouts.
I had this idea where people's inventions/devices could be sent around in a "pay-it-forward circle" for learning and inspiration. People already do that with crystals.
Also, can being aware that x number of people are working on the same thing yield to development in the state-of-the-art if they start working together?
I suppose there's always that tension between DIY'ers bouncing ideas off each other vs prototypes built in fitted-out research labs to think about.
Is this idea anything more that just the addition of another sub-reddit or using existing teamwork software?
If you had something to share, how would you choose it amongst the 10's or 100's of things you have already built? Maybe you'd need commercialization help? Are there liabilities and risks in sharing DIY devices?
I've been thinking about https://openhardware.directory/ and https://ohwr.org/ - maybe if you list your projects, agents can do the work of bringing people together and finding new ways to develop them. It's about value-adding on top of decentralized and disjointed projects. An easy way to construct plans or follow them? How to minimize duplicated work across the world?
Maybe a "Universal Commerce Protocol" (http://ucp.dev) but for scientists?
Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.
I just do other things now.
Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).
It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.
Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it’s tedious, I’ll drag me feet a while, but eventually it’ll be done. It’s just work.
That said, I think your day job is more enjoyable when you see your work as a craft. It becomes less of a chore, you feel more engaged, and generally happier, which ultimately has a positive impact on your work and your colleagues. This has been my very fuzzy experience over the years, going through periods of both, but there are no definitive perspectives either way.
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?
That said, the second paragraph has the distinctive stocatto tone of AI
But AI is shaping how we write, so this could well all be hand written just by someone who spends time with AI output.
[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...