I think creative people always do fun projects. I think it depends where you are in your career whether it will give you material gains. In my opinion these pr

I think creative people always do fun projects. I think it depends where you are in your career whether it will give you material gains. In my opinion these projects, and generally building a network amongst developers can help you if you are a beginner, looking for entry-level jobs. But in my experience after a point the job offers you get this way might not be the best amongst the offers you get. For example at 1998 I wrote a real-time ray tracer, and because of it a game-engine company offeed me a job as a script writer. They said I am not experienced enough to join their core engine team. Nowadays, it is even worse: I get the best opportunities from people who are not even technical. The best job/contracting opportunities come from people who are good businessmen, but not technical. They cannot evaluate me based on my fun projects, they evaluate me based on some relatively boring previous jobs/works in their industry. I do my fun projects for myself, or because I want to create paying products of them. I occasionally tell about them to fellow hackers; not because I want to get yet another low paying entry-level job, but because it is fun to speak about a fun project.