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There is one thing that is extremely important for me as a developer that I cannot really do at work: reinventing the wheel. My GitHub is full of wheel reinven

There is one thing that is extremely important for me as a developer that I cannot really do at work: reinventing the wheel. My GitHub is full of wheel reinventions (TCP load balancer, B+tree index, monitoring daemon...). No employer would have paid for me to develop these projects, and yet I learned so many invaluable skills by doing them. I'm happy to invest my free time this way because I feel that I develop myself, but keeping a healthy balance is hard. I've noticed that I can keep working on a side-project after work for a few weeks until starting to feel burnt-out, losing motivation for both work and the side-project.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dvdhnt 9y ago
> No employer would have paid for me to develop these projects, and yet I learned so many invaluable skills by doing them. I'm going to disagree with you here. It depends on the employer, and more often, the circumstances at any given time. For example, last week I spent the time writing my own implementations of HOTP/TOTP based on the RFCs [1][2]. I did this all at work while being paid. They also paid me to extract and open source our param validation tools. Both cases served me more than the company, but the company benefited because of the skills I learned while doing both. All of that to say, you're half right - under most circumstances you won't be paid to do a passion project. Though, there are parts of your work for a company where you can make an argument for reinventing the wheel rather than pulling in an existing OSS package. Your employer has to see the value in the long game which too often isn't the case. Cheers. 1. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4226 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4226 2. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238