I'm paraphrasing Merlin Mann, but another benefit of this approach in a day-job environment is that you demonstrate you are capable and deserving of doing cool

I'm paraphrasing Merlin Mann, but another benefit of this approach in a day-job environment is that you demonstrate you are capable and deserving of doing cool work. When a shiny Rails project is coming down the pipeline, is it more likely to be staffed by someone who hasn't done Ruby before or the engineer who's got a personal Rails project on her GitHub and blog posts about lessons learned? Who is top of mind when a client comes in and needs a mobile app built? The person who gave a lunch-and-learn talk about iOS last week. Want to take a week to explore a new framework instead of getting stuck on maintenance work between billable projects? Well, if you have a track record of producing artifacts of value it is a much easier sell to $MANAGER.