I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.
My company's platform is built on open source tech, a lot of which isn't mature yet, so we end up fixing bugs and adding features to it at our day job. Upstreaming them to the community is another story, and even when the code is finished and tested, things like backwards compatibility on old versions of the package and running on platforms you don't use can be a bear to support. It's definitely time consuming even when you can do the development at work.
My experience on other open source projects has also been when you put the work in to open a relevant PR and the maintainers just never respond to it. That's definitely frustrating.
A lot of companies encourage open source contributions and maintenance. Some companies even have departments of engineering dedicated to open source. And yes, when people like the community and technology, contributing does not feel like work. Some contribute because of more “practical” reasons—still, completely legitimate—such as improving their visibility for job hiring. It is always impressive to get a résumé with a GitHub and StackOverflow links.
I have a solid 1 hour train trip to and from work. Because of where I live I get a single train and always have a seat. Thats where I get the majority of it done.
I did a lot after school ages 19-23. Now after work I want to play games, spend time with my girlfriend, watch movies, and read books. And if I want to code, it's to learn an interesting technology (sometimes I mix this with contributing). It seems that unless programming is your main hobby, it's hard to find the time to do it.
I did a lot during University years (while in a different major). I learned, I taught people, it was really fun. Now I only have the time/energy for 2-3 simultaneous side projects, with only 1 being open source at the moment. There's no way I could be doing the same was I married and with kids.
Programming is my hobby as well as my job. I don't think it's controversial to say that people can find plenty of time for their hobbies, even with a family; therefore, you would expect someone to have plenty of time for programming-as-a-hobby.
