I agree about the resume-driven development aspect, and I think it's great to use a personal project as an outlet for experimentation! Too many people do stuff

I agree about the resume-driven development aspect, and I think it's great to use a personal project as an outlet for experimentation! Too many people do stuff like that at the expense of unnecessary complexity in production systems. I'll grant that collectively an engineering team might decide to overengineer a simple, noncritical service to get production experience with a technology or two that they are targeting for future adoption. Nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with making room in the schedule for engineering experiments to test out new technologies. Managers and the rest of the business, for their part, need to understand the need for experimentation so it can be done honestly and not under the guise of other work.