Coding outside of work is a wonderfully awesome pursuit. The pressure to do so is either misguided or self-manufactured.
I go through periods of lots of coding outside of work and periods of no coding outside of work depending on my motivations and interests at the time.
I personally almost always read about coding or listen to dev podcasts outside of work. I spend a lot of time reading dev.to, of course. But doing so in a lean-back mode as opposed to lean-forward mode is definitely different.
Our brains, motivations, personal goals, energy levels, family-lives, are so utterly variant that being overly prescriptive about how others should manage their careers is a recipe for disaster. I casually take part in open source but I could not fathom being a maintainer of a popular project outside work. It seems hellish to have the kind of responsibility that comes with that. But people do it and love it, even if it burns them out sometimes.
I watched this talk by Sam Phippen about the process of keeping rspec up-to-date with new Rails versions and the pain an commitment it takes blows my mind.
I could see a time in my life in the future where this could be a lot of fun, but at the moment it does not compute. When I was newer to software development I definitely felt the pressure to take part in all these activities, but none of it's all optional.
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Coding outside of work is a wonderfully awesome pursuit. The pressure to do so is either misguided or self-manufactured.
I go through periods of lots of coding outside of work and periods of no coding outside of work depending on my motivations and interests at the time.
I personally almost always read about coding or listen to dev podcasts outside of work. I spend a lot of time reading dev.to, of course. But doing so in a lean-back mode as opposed to lean-forward mode is definitely different.
Our brains, motivations, personal goals, energy levels, family-lives, are so utterly variant that being overly prescriptive about how others should manage their careers is a recipe for disaster. I casually take part in open source but I could not fathom being a maintainer of a popular project outside work. It seems hellish to have the kind of responsibility that comes with that. But people do it and love it, even if it burns them out sometimes.
I watched this talk by Sam Phippen about the process of keeping rspec up-to-date with new Rails versions and the pain an commitment it takes blows my mind.
I could see a time in my life in the future where this could be a lot of fun, but at the moment it does not compute. When I was newer to software development I definitely felt the pressure to take part in all these activities, but none of it's all optional.