

Ask HN: Do all techies have a huge list of pet projects? - Rabidgremlin
http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/projects/

======
sophacles
A lot do. A quick look at my "projects" folder shows 12 different projects. My
snippets and quickies and tests folders have hundreds of files. Various
accounts at github, googlecode, etc contain more projects publicly available.
The src folders of various machines contain projects for work, or OSS projects
with code I've modified for experimenting. This is the result of many years of
coding, prolly the last 15 or so. It should be noted that almost all of them
are in some state of abandonment. All of them are incomplete. Most don't even
work to their intended purpose, they just exist as attempts to understand
various concepts.

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)

~~~
niyazpk
_...prolly..._

I had to look that up: <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=prolly>

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trjordan
No.

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.

~~~
qw
I have no problems with working 12 hours a day for a short time, but I would
never do it over a longer time period. A work day should not exceed 8 hours
(lunch not included) in my opinion. I actually find my work interesting and
enjoy working there, but I need to keep my work life and personal life
separate.

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.

------
jasonwilk
Personally, I keep a running list of ideas (I have about 50), but I try to
stay focused on one project only, or two depending on how many cofounders and
my level of involvement with each. Trying to actually push to market and think
you will hav success by managing 100 working concepts is just crazy. Don't do
it.

~~~
roundsquare
Hmm, to me, pet projects aren't usually meant to make money. I consider them
more just things for fun, though I suppose they might at some point become
profitable.

~~~
dazzawazza
Agreed, often it's the pet projects that provide a playground for ideas that
may help the main job/project/goal/company but they are also valuable for
clearing the mind and helping you have fun and relax.

------
cabalamat

      phil:~$ ls ~/proj -F|grep "/"|wc -l
      100
    

Not all are programming projects, mind.

~~~
dryicerx

        $ ls ~/project | wc -l
        62
    

all current (pet + primary) projects

------
mahmud
I have close to 40 pet projects and businesses that I oscillate between
throughout the year. Most of it is on my TODO for learning purposes, others as
a gift to friends, but a good chunk of them as support projects that I use in
my other projects. I do A LOT of niche software: Arabic applications written
in Common Lisp. I am pretty much my own tool vendor :-/

------
dlsspy
I've got quite a few: <http://github.com/dustin> (I've also got unpublished
projects and projects not published on github).

I've met people who _don't_ have such things and are still competent, but not
terribly commonly.

------
alanthonyc
My running list is at twenty-nine, of the ones I thought were good enough to
write down. I'm working on one at the moment and really want to get working on
two or three more. The rest are just "might be nice" to work on someday.

------
ax0n
Too many to list here. I should probably start a project to enumerate my
projects.

------
kingkilr
I'd say so. <http://github.com/alex> of those at least 7 are ones I've worked
on lately, plus some others that aren't on there. <3 open source.

------
johnrob
I've used csvjdbc quite a bit over the years - thanks!

~~~
Rabidgremlin
I'm glad you found it useful!

------
rms
Most of mine involve raising money for resarch

------
aaronblohowiak
No.

Some of us have interesting resumes.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I suppose I should clarify: I don't maintain a list of mostly abandoned or
"prototype" code. It'd get something new every few days. I also don't publish
a lot of blog posts or open-source software. Instead, I try to find
interesting clients, take on interesting projects at work, or experiment with
new methodology there.. and maintain my "trophy case" on my resume. Does
~/scratchpad contain a crap-ton of half-baked or throw-away code? Sure, but
I'm not about to spend time making a list or putting it on the internet.

~~~
sophacles
You seem to be opposing open source software to "interesting work" -- which in
some feilds such an opposition holds truth. In others all the interesting work
is open source.

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.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
In my individual case, working on open-source software would be opposed to
paid work (with interesting as an orthogonal concern,) but I am trying to
remedy that aspect.

