
Ask HN: Do You Code at Home? - gravy
I asked around at my office and it surprised me to find out that even some people who I found were really knowledgeable don&#x27;t code at home. Is that rare? What kind of projects do you work on, if you do? Are they usually small?
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yulaow
I have three others main hobbies (powerlifting, videogames and novels books)
and a fiance. I already give programming 40hours week (hoping to reduce them
growing up), the remaining hours are for my other passions and my
friends/family

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drakonka
I love to code at home and it's very important to me. I've had many hobby
projects over the years. Aside from fulfilling a curiosity to learn and
experiment with things that may not be directly relevant to my day job, I find
that when work gets stressful coding in my spare time helps keep me grounded
and helps me relax. Until fairly recently I used to have periods where I'd
have to put in a lot of hours at work ahead of a deadline or release and I
believe having my own projects to focus on in what little spare time I did
have also helped prevent burnout - it's a nice reminder that I have my own
thing going outside of my day job.

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krapp
I do _all_ of my coding at home, because I don't actually have a job writing
code. All personal projects, and some attempts at contributing to Anarki.

I literally have Visual Studio open right now while I waste time messing about
here, working on hobby game development code that will never see a game.

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otras
I transitioned into tech without a CS degree and did a great deal of coding at
home outside of my day job to learn. At first my day job was tutoring, then
customer support and some dev work, then a junior programming position, and
now a software engineering position at a big tech co. Up until my current job
I was always building projects and grinding outside of my work hours.

At the big tech co I learn a great deal and do a lot of programming during the
day, and I now enjoy a healthier work/life balance and spend time on the rest
of my life. I also don't have that same " _break into the industry_ " need,
which is very freeing.

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Doe22
I work from home somewhat regularly, so on those days I'll code at home for
sure.

If you're asking about doing personal coding projects outside of work then I
only do that rarely. I do plenty of coding at work and generally want to
decompress or do my own thing at home. Occasionally I'll try out a tutorial
project or some small bit of learning, but that's typically it. If I wanted to
seriously look for a new job I'd probably try to do something more.

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dhruvkar
>> some people who I found were really knowledgeable don't code at home

How old/what phase of life were they in?

I find that, in general (anecdotally), this tends to slow down for most people
as they age or advance in their careers.

In the beginning, we have time/energy, desire to learn/advance our skills. As
these tendencies reduce over time, only the more hard-core/passionate remain.

So if say it's depends on this spectrum when asking knowledgeable programmers
if they code at home. They might have already gone through that phase.

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gitgud
_Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or
get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program._ \- Linus
Torvalds

This hits home for me, Open Source development is mainly done by people who
love it and work on projects after hours.

I personally enjoy working on small webapp ideas and libraries to hopefully
help others with their projects. The smaller the project the more likely it
will be completed, so that's preferred.

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externalreality
I think many successful coders do not code at home. I do, and when I was a
younger developer it wasn't a good thing. There needs to be a clean separation
between work and home. Now that I am older I am better at keeping a separation
between work and home. I can even work from home and keep a clean separation
now strangely enough.

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quickthrower2
Try and stop me! However I’m not going to spend hours coding at home, and I’ll
do fun and simple stuff. What I find hard is working on a complex ongoing
project because that feels too much like what I do at work.

On the other hand I don’t think you need to code at home to be good. If you
have a job with some freedom to learn stuff during the day that helps a lot.

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namelosw
Yes but mostly learning novel technologies, and try it in some very small
project or snippets.

These days I'm reading _the little typer_ and there's a dependent type
language named Pie in it. It's really a pleasant to read.

Things like this I probably no chance to learn and use at work for tens of
years. So I have to do it off-work.

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sj3k
Yep. I'm a slow tinkerer; mostly on the weekends for a couple hours at a time.
Im trying to learn React Native and do the courses on fast.ai.

I have a hard time motivating myself to code after work if I think I won't be
able to work on a project for at least a couple hours at a time. Its hard to
do with a wife, friends, community stuff.

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tmtowtdi
It seems to depend how busy I am at work. If I'm in a less-busy time at work
and am not doing a lot of actual progamming, I tend to come up with projects
to do at home more. It's like there's a little itch that crops up; "you
haven't made a thing in a while - go make a thing."

~~~
gravy
What kinds of things do you make?

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tmtowtdi
Usually little tools for my own use. Lots of times they're things that already
have good alternatives, but I wanted to see what I'd come up with - weather
script, a show-me-my-router's-IP script, bash version of the mark/jump utility
I've seen for zsh and fish shell. I got into making autoclickers for a while
and signed up for a bunch of browser-based idle games, just to see if I could
manage to control an autoclicker with Perl.

For me it seems to be more about seeing if I can do something I haven't done
before, or if I can make something that I personally like, than trying to make
something that anybody else would find particularly useful.

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dev_north_east
I only ever code at home when I'm prepping for an interview.

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ioddly
Yes.

I'm making slow progress on one personal project that I use on a daily basis.
It's small by the standards of bigcorp code but the value to me is large.
Other than that I tinker around a little bit, start things with different
languages or libraries.

Also I work remote so technically I write all of my code at home :P

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rcarmo
Yeah, although I’ve tended to do that less and less over the years. I
typically play with new languages, tweak my blog engine or do low-level coding
for fun.

Of course, this does not include stuff done during regular work hours when I
do work from home.

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oaw-bct-ar-bamf
No. I devoted 5 years to study computer science. I won’t program if it’s not
getting paid for. Separation of work and private life is important for me.

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ohiovr
I'm self employed so I code at home. I would imagine though that if I were
employed full time somewhere I'd rather not spend any more time working at
home than I had to.

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Silmarilos
I love to code at home, but it depends on the individual. I generally find
that those who program on their own for their own reasons tend to be the best
coders.

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happppy
Only when I want to learn something I am very much interested in, which is
rare.

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zzo38computer
I do all of the computer programming at home.

