I have almost stopped doing coding on the side, outside of my job. Here’s why…
Initial Motivation
A few months ago, a bit of burnout and a bit of disenchantment with the kinds of tasks that positions available to my geography and choice of tech stack provided led me to decide to make a change.
I left a job doing software architecture for systems based in Go for one that uses Python. Now, I am not new to Python; I began delving into it when I was at university around 2004 or 2005, worked with it, and even started a company that mainly focused on Python development. This change entails leaving a “hot” technology on a daily basis for one that is a bit more established and not as much at the crest of the wave.
Python is a solid, broadly used language, but Go is what the “cool kids” do—or at least many of the projects I consider cool.
Lying to Myself
My first reaction was a nonchalant one: I could continue doing Go on the side and work on Python during my work hours. My new position and environment imply a lot less burnout, which leaves me with a lot more mental energy by the end of the day.
However, I didn’t do that. I have been sending patches here and there to projects I like and dabbling a bit with new developments in the language, but that’s it.
I Am Too Old for This, and That’s a Good Thing
I don’t code full-fledged projects in my free time anymore, not because I can’t, but because I just don’t want to. I used to do this as a younger engineer, ramping up my skills as much as I could, often at the expense of my free time.
Your own silly projects are a great playground where you can fail at will with little consequence and rewrite things a thousand times. There’s also the persistent dream of transitioning from hobby to side hustle if a project takes off (which, as we know, rarely happens).
I recently had a conversation with a dear friend and colleague, and he had a very good way to summarize it:
I think we see the people who code a lot outside work because they talk about it a lot, and we don’t realize all the people who don’t code that much anymore because nobody talks about the things they’re not doing. :)
In Summary
There is an age for developing one’s skills, and there’s an age when this has diminishing returns. I do some small, mini attempts at coding ephemeral bits to test new, interesting things I read about, but they die on my laptop—sometimes they only live in /tmp. My free time is now spent doing sports, which has increasing returns, given the age thing 😛. I also do other things I enjoy: art, crafting, 3D printing—whatever fancies my interest. This, in turn, improves my ability to think outside the usual confines of my profession.
I would advise anyone to consider the benefits of other activities if, like me, they find themselves worrying that their careers might suffer if they stop being an engineer for five minutes.