IANAL - First check your work contracts. US corporations often make you sign abusive work contracts where they own anything you think or write even on your ow

IANAL - First check your work contracts. US corporations often make you sign abusive work contracts where they own anything you think or write even on your own time. In that case I would advise you first to negociate a new contract. - One way to avoid mixing work with pleasure would be to use entirely different programming languages and stacks. However, it's true that a program can be considered derived work of another independently of the programming language (in terms of copyright laws, translations are considered derived works), and there are of course those silly software patents and IP. - Therefore: Just don't do it. - Or, if you really cannot help, once you've pushed to github your own code, you could license it under GPL or BSD/MIT, and then at work ask for permission to include this open source library. This will give you a couple of weeks or months before the legal service answers by the negative, and then you will be able to re-invent it in a different way, or to find an entirely different solution.