I'm a software engineer of 15+ years. Something that I struggle with is outside of work collaboration. Making pet projects and learning skills alone only gets someone so far.
On one hand there is no external eye to validate or to challenge. On another hand the likeliness of a sole average(!) developer building something significant is very little.
I've had the experience in being part of open source communities before - through work. The depth of problems and speed of bootstrapping was substantially higher than any solo work.
The advice I've got is always the same:
- just start contributing
- just pick a popular project with a great community
- just start something with a friend
Not to hide behind excuses - as I'm still lucky enough to find couple of hours a week to doodle on personal projects - but family and life puts these hours to places that are either hard to sync with other people or just makes you impatient waiting for a reply from a community.
Anywho - I was wondering if there is a great story anyone had starting from this solo-dev lifestyle and being able to work with other smart folks outside of work on something fun. Are there better communities/project than others? Are there unobvious lifehacks?
I only need about 5 hours of sleep per day and a 15 minute nap in the afternoon. If you talk me to death I can easily make time for additional naps.
I learned to program while traveling across Afghanistan on a year long military adventure. Most of programming actually occurs outside of work, so at this point I have an extra career’s worth of programming experience most long experienced developers don’t have.
The solution to finding the extra time is really about being in good physical heath and being obsessive about learning and/or building something original. That’s it. When you obsess about something you will continue to think about it while doing your job, showering, and jogging. You will choose jobs that don’t waste time with a bunch of stupid repetition even if that means less pay. With an obsessive focus you will produce what other people cannot. You will have a level of initiative that most people cannot dream of.
There are downsides to thinking and living like this. You will tend to be ultra focused on product delivery and produce superior quality work, a real 10x developer. Not wasting time on unnecessary bullshit is a huge incompatibility when most of your peers can only reproduce repeated patterns. It super harms career mobility because you are not at all interested with impressing people or justifying your existence. You will believe the quality of your work speaks for itself because it solves its stated goal directly with minimal code. Most people don’t think like that and find it repulsive.
People will also have trouble understanding you. Being obsessed about a subject most people don’t understand, even when those other people do it professionally, results in bizarre social results. Family won’t understand. You have to really go out of your way to find people who enjoy hobby work with a greater zeal than they put into their actual day job. Surprisingly, church has been a huge vector for encountering other people like this, but then this kind of learning/involvement are social encouraged by my church.