Agreed - having a pet project at work can really make you well known. It's far more realistic since you're already in the working mode in your brain. At the end

Agreed - having a pet project at work can really make you well known. It's far more realistic since you're already in the working mode in your brain. At the end of the long day you could not get me to code anything anymore. But while I'm at work I still have some mental strength left to do the code gymnastics. Who knows, that pet project might get picked up by the enterprise as a product or an internal tool that others might use. In my past experience, some of the pet project dashboards that I made to make my life easier have been picked up by higher ups since they improved troubleshooting/time to recovery metrics.