Interview went well until i asked my questions about them.

"Are pet-projects a thing in your company"
... no.

"Can i attend programming gigs in a workweek, and are they paid by the company"
... no, no

"Any restrictions on the IDE"
... yes we only allow visual studio
"Wait, frontend web development in vs?"
... yes

"Do you develop in other languages then JavaScript"
... only Java

I calmly stood up, told them "I dont think that the company and I are a good fit. Thanks for your time."

Do you guys feel a need to create something "cool" and "unique" but have a hard time coming up with ideas?

Github == Graveyard

Projects thats been left behind,
Pet projects which are never maintained,
Some newly dug graves waiting for git push (might never happen) ,
Decaying code over time.

Just sayin. There might be graves of code which are loved around and are visited...

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Its the monthly Empty_repository_deletion day. 😂

Weekend starts now!!
Beer, pet projects and weed all a developer needs.

!Rant
Finally I'm having my vacation. Goodbye mother fucking legacy system. Hello pet projects and gaming. God, have mercy on the lost souls at work ;)

I gave up on learning math as a young person because no one was ever interested in teaching it in a way that made sense to me.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started working on a pet projects that require understanding of (what I would consider) fairly advanced geometry, which as it turns out is called computational geometry. And it’s fun.

I just look back at the time I was afraid of this stuff with regret. All because my teachers weren’t terribly interested in teaching, but more interested in fulfilling useless metrics that only make it look like students are learning when they’re actually not.

to all of you out there scared to get into a Dev position because of no formal education:

I don't have any finished formal education, just a bunch of experience from pet projects and free lance here and there. I applied for a position this morning, got an email before the afternoon with an invitation for an interview!

companies are looking for brains, not pieces of paper. just take the jump and try!

I think I know now where "Pet project" got its name from: 1) Most of us would rather play with it all day instead of going to work. 2) As it grow bigger, eventually you'll have to shed out a couple bucks for it, and.. 3) Your PM would be FURIOUS if he caught you playing with it at the office.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

ARGH the next person to tell me how X is the best toolchain is getting their fucking head cut off! Holy fucking shit, this is even more annoying than the whole IDE debate. At least with IDEs everyone has a favourite one and they hate others accordingly, with build toolchains there's always a huge group of fucktards sucking each other's dick by adding new features, and they're always too busy wanking their sparkling features for small projects to realise how fucking inefficient their polished dings and dongs are for any bigger job.

For the millionth time, no, we're not switching to this popular toolchain just because it gave you a blowjob with your pet project (although that would indeed be a tempting offer), so stop talking how fast and flexible it is. Until you can show how it compiles a 500 MB project faster than our current setup, I don't give a shit how many people jerk on that nookie.

I quit my job in January. I haven't worked for 6 months, I live off savings and investments and I don't really know what to do with myself except that I finally have time to finish all my pet projects and I'm really doing them one by one, which makes me feel the best I have in years.

Moneywise, I've thought about writing a book or a game, but I mostly just ride my bike or Netflix and chill and do literally nothing.

I'm almost 40 and I feel like I was 18 but very, very sleepy - all the time.

Thoughts?

Also, I asked AI and it assumed I'm a woman. I find that funny.

My rant is that I low key hate devRant.

I'm 23, I'm an average software engineer, with some expertise in machine learning and with a decent job.
But seeing all your cool stories, skills and rants makes me feel like I don't know shit and everyone else is just more driven, skillful and passionate, taking care of a 1000 pet projects at a time and dominating their work routine.

Oh impostor syndrome, how I've missed you!

P.S.: I still love your rants, keep them coming.

What you could have:
- simple project structure
- common lib with modular logic
- import logic as needed in you services

What you do:
- waste months to write an opinionated framework that works only if used in a super specific way
- have a fat sample project as example
- use a code generator to copy and rename the said sample project whenever you create a new service
- have everything break whenever something new is added in the framework
- oh and keep the framework in active development while others work on the client services, so lots of things will break often and out of nowhere

Fucking god, i hate when people make pet projects out of work projects

That feeling when you pump out pet projects for a few days and then suddenly you stop and your entire wednesday feels wasted.

Three years into my "on the side" consulting business, I actually turned a profit! Most of my business "expenses" are my personal AWS pet projects, certification exam fees, and my hosted Gmail accounts. I'm super excited :)

Got thousands of pet projects partially completed because nobody is actually interested in collaborating and I'm too lazy to do them all the way alone.

Note: I posted this as a comment, but figured it could be a rant on its own.

I absolutely hate what frameworks like Bootstrap did for the web. True, 10 or 20 years ago quick personal / pet project sites looked plain and boring, and only sites with dedicated developers had a nice layout. But what did Bootstrap bring? Those "minimal effort" sites still look boring as fuck, except now they have Bootstrap look & feel. What's even worse is that thanks to Bootstrap, every fucking UI kit is just Bootstrap with more bloat. To further prove my point, if you google "material CSS" you'll find a ton of projects, and except for the official Google projects, they all look & feel like a mutilated incest child of Bootstrap and MD because instead of making their own implementations, everyone just started with Bootstrap. And the same goes for all sorts of templates which look & feel nothing like Bootstrap, but thanks to its shitty influence devs still start with Bootstrap instead of writing clean CSS which does what a template needs without extra bloat.

NO FUCKING WONDER I SUCKED-ASS IN HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA!!!!!

Arghgghhghgh ughhh....

I want to beef up the hell out of my Maths Chops so I can maybe try going back to school for a A.S. in EE or hell even an B.S.

I'm using my company's Safari Learning account for getting free-ish access to college algebra books and I'm self studying.

I'm still in Chapter 0 where the book covers shit you're supposed to know from previous years of education. I'm just learning about some of this shit now!!!

While it's possible that I didn't pay attention in high school lectures, I took geometry in 9th grade and was an A/B+ student and felt confident in maths. I got to Algebra II in High School and suddenly nothing made sense anymore, reality fucking-fell-apart!

Suddenly, I'm failing tests left and right and struggling with the lecture concepts and I could never seem to grasp materials covered in class anymore to even be able to finish the homework assignments.

Fast forward to me being 15 years older and wanting to take a stab at this shit again, but with new found determination to get into EE so I can fuck around with small electronics for pet projects I want to do. I'm starting with College Algebra to try and learn when suddenly, low and behold I have a HUGE FUCK-MOTHERING GAP in my core understanding of the language/syntax/grammar of mathematics.

Been fucking knee-capped for the last decade+ because I either slacked off during those fundamental lectures (which again; is totally plausible) or I had a complete fucking imbecile for a math teacher that glossed over the topics and fucked not only me but the 40+ other kids in that class.

I'm not going to blame the teacher, although I really fucking want to, but I can't remember how the class scored on tests or homework to be able to fairly and objectively make that judgement against the educator.

FUCK!!! I hate my 15 y.o. self right now

There's only three endgame situations I can imagine: Become fuel for AI's projects, become some kind of pet or archived memorabilia thing stored in a vat of amniotic fluid, or merge brain and be human-AI hybrid.

Don't know if the concept of "job" is still meaningful in any of those scenarios.

Long Holidays == Working on my pet projects thats going nowhere...

I have lost all motivation for coding.....I have my pet projects pending. During this lockdown i decided to get work done, but for some reason i just can't get my ass working and keep wasting time.

How do you guys keep yourself motivated?

A game engine library so new nobody has ever written working hotkeys for it lol

Despite being in fervent development like 4 years now and fancy 3d shaders and such

Do I contribute by publishing a hotkey library. I kinda don't wanna. Sounds like a pain.

It also baffles me rust examples are far and few in between on the internet. I remember learning older languages and there was always so many examples, pet blogs, and projects you'd find all over you could learn from. I wonder if times have just changed somehow?

I tend to be a perfectionist, and I have a hard time coping when I feel like someone isn’t happy with work that I’ve done, or when I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own standards.

I’ve been at my current job for a little more than a year, and for the vast majority of that time, my supervisor and coworkers have seemed very pleased with me. My performance reviews so far have been completely positive. But I’m aware that over the past month or so, I’ve run up against more challenges than usual. I’ve taken on some new projects that I haven’t felt entirely confident about, there have been some organizational changes, and because this is a busy time for my department, I don’t always feel like I can easily get help when I have a question about something.

To make things worse, I struggle with anxiety, and while I’ve been working very hard to manage it, all it takes is a few bad days to put me behind on things. I really want to step up to the plate, and I’ve been worried that expressing concerns would make me look like I’m not capable or like I’m a complainer. But the truth is, I’ve been getting in over my head a bit, and I worry that it’s reflecting poorly on me. I haven’t made any terrible mistakes, but it’s taken me longer than usual to complete or follow up on tasks and I haven’t been as organized as I usually am. My supervisor hasn’t gotten upset with me, and she’s expressed understanding, but I’m worried that she has less confidence in me than she used to.

To be fair to myself, over the past couple weeks I feel like I’ve been doing a good job at catching up and getting back to my usual level of efficiency. I feel optimistic about my ability to handle things from here on out, at least for the most part. But I’m scared that a few “off” weeks will damage my reputation and workplace relationships, and that people are thinking poorly of me now. I think because I’m so hard on myself (I feel guilty whenever someone praises me, because I don’t feel like I deserve it), it’s hard for me to have an accurate perception of how things actually are.

Also, do you have any tips for addressing challenges when they come up? I struggle with asking for help or clarification sometimes because I don’t want to come across like I need my hand held. And do you have any suggestions for how to deal with it when things just aren’t going smoothly? I know that in the workplace, what matters is results. The fact that I might be having a bad day due to anxiety or a late night with a sick pet isn’t an excuse. But while I think I’m generally good at managing stress and anxiety and that bad days are uncommon, I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever go through a tough time and that that won’t impact my focus at all.

I'm done with all dev tasks. I don't know how am I supposed to spend next 5-6 hours :-/
Not interested in working on pet projects either.

I get the point of a daily check in meeting for the team. I really do. But when all it is is pushing pet projects and bitching about shit that has nothing to do with the entire team, it gets tedious. Also, why are product managers so needlessly optimistic and peppy? It's early in the morning. Stop it.

The thing that you have a million ideas for pet projects and that this blocks your brain so much that you can't do any of them...

!rant
For people who actually finished or published their pet projects.

How do you plan it?
Time wise, and setting project limits.

Is it wrong that I hate Java?
I tried learning it before, couldn't get myself to, I thought there was something wrong with me, maybe im not open to learning new languages

Then I got introduced to F#, Loved it! Even moved portions of pet projects to it
Looked at Java again
Still hate it.
Advice?

I write code as part of my job but also tend to have a lot of pet projects I think about in my spare time. A lot of those projects are not specifically targeted at solving an actual real problem but are just a curiosity (like my Duktape/ECMAScript thing that could import and call DLL routines.) I often find it difficult to choose which one to continue working on and end up not working on any of them because I can't decide which one is more interesting at the time! Or I get stuck and struggle to find a way around whatever roadblock I've hit.

I'm on vacation. Hello, pet projects!

I'd like to work for a small software house that pays decent, understands a life/work balance (40hr/wk), has a relaxed environment, worries more about the end product than timelines, and gives you Fridays to work on pet projects and training.

Spent the day helping my family to pack their bags. Just got home after dropping them to airport. No energy left to code. My pet projects are never gonna finish 😢

Tech and product teams have to be aligned. If not, there’s chaos where dev teams suffer. No skunk project(s), no adhoc project(s), No special or pet projects for the CTO or Product Manager. Figure out what needs to get done, plan a road map, plan milestones to get there, consider the folks who ACTUALLY does the work. Protect your teams work-life balance.

We're in the future, folks! I love it when applications do this unexpectedly(only in my pet projects tho).

Guess who is getting his Lumia 950XL in 3-5 business days?
Hint: ME :p
Will finally get to play with and implement Continuum in pet projects~

How do you find inspiration and motivation for your pet projects?

I can't help but stress out about finding work in development. I just want an internship / entry level summer position to put myself in a better position for post college and to explore and learn in new environments. But it seems like my best chance for scoring that internship is building a solid portfolio or experience, something that I haven't had time to do..

I wrote my first line of code (that wasn't HTML or CSS) when I got to college. Since then almost all my time has gone into my cs engineering curriculum and working a real shitty blue collar job during breaks (for 4 years now) because Im broke and got denied by the 20+ positions I applied for. I can't really do anything with the code I wrote for my schoolwork because I can get fucked if I post it anywhere or share it. I have loads of ideas, but am worried that they are too big to do while maintaining my GPA and scholarships. It sucks too because I am a quick learner, and would even venture to call myself good at what I do.

So since I have hardly been able to pursue any independent studies, I haven't been able to really explore the field, so I don't even know what to areas i need to focus on to make myself a better candidate. So basically I'm broke, don't have shit for pet projects, don't know what I want to do with my life, and can probably expect to work like a dog next summer too because I've heard most companies hire for the summer in the fall.

I don't write this because I feel bad for myself. I write this because it's likely that most people here have been in a similar situation. I also don't like to make excuses for myself like I have been doing. Any advice folks? What should I be doing differently?

What software methodology do you work on your pet projects?.. I'm a newbie and I'd like to get some rough ideas..

Do you guys have people in your office that just REFUSE to cooperate, or people who tell you they'll cooperate, but then they literally do anything except for cooperate?

I'm having trouble with the latter; I've been trying to get one of our less experienced members to work on our deployment. He's successfully configured at least 4 other deployments, and this one is the EXACT SAME as the other ones. The issue is that the person who is im control of this particular master console is someone higher up than me, but they don't know how to delegate. Thus everything that they touch becomes their own little pet project that no one else can dare touch, because they'll "mess it up" (not do it the right way according to his limited bible of best practices).

So now I'm stuck here, trying to convince HIS BOSS to get him access, but i even HE cant get him to do it! Now I'm sitting here waiting, getting more and more fed up with this guy, because like i said, it's his MO: im on two other projects with him, and they're all moving at a GLACIER'S pace.

Seriously, if you dont have the time for a project, but it on the backburner, dont start it and make your other projects suffer.