Ask HN: Do You Code at Home?

I'm self employed so I code at home. I would imagine though that if I were employed full time somewhere I'd rather not spend any more time working at home than I had to.

Yeah, although I’ve tended to do that less and less over the years. I typically play with new languages, tweak my blog engine or do low-level coding for fun.

Of course, this does not include stuff done during regular work hours when I do work from home.

Yep. I'm a slow tinkerer; mostly on the weekends for a couple hours at a time. Im trying to learn React Native and do the courses on fast.ai.

I have a hard time motivating myself to code after work if I think I won't be able to work on a project for at least a couple hours at a time. Its hard to do with a wife, friends, community stuff.

Yes.

I'm making slow progress on one personal project that I use on a daily basis. It's small by the standards of bigcorp code but the value to me is large. Other than that I tinker around a little bit, start things with different languages or libraries.

Also I work remote so technically I write all of my code at home :P

I have three others main hobbies (powerlifting, videogames and novels books) and a fiance. I already give programming 40hours week (hoping to reduce them growing up), the remaining hours are for my other passions and my friends/family

I do all of my coding at home, because I don't actually have a job writing code. All personal projects, and some attempts at contributing to Anarki.

I literally have Visual Studio open right now while I waste time messing about here, working on hobby game development code that will never see a game.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. - Linus Torvalds

This hits home for me, Open Source development is mainly done by people who love it and work on projects after hours.

I personally enjoy working on small webapp ideas and libraries to hopefully help others with their projects. The smaller the project the more likely it will be completed, so that's preferred.

Try and stop me! However I’m not going to spend hours coding at home, and I’ll do fun and simple stuff. What I find hard is working on a complex ongoing project because that feels too much like what I do at work.

On the other hand I don’t think you need to code at home to be good. If you have a job with some freedom to learn stuff during the day that helps a lot.

It seems to depend how busy I am at work. If I'm in a less-busy time at work and am not doing a lot of actual progamming, I tend to come up with projects to do at home more. It's like there's a little itch that crops up; "you haven't made a thing in a while - go make a thing."

I love to code at home, but it depends on the individual. I generally find that those who program on their own for their own reasons tend to be the best coders.

>> some people who I found were really knowledgeable don't code at home

How old/what phase of life were they in?

I find that, in general (anecdotally), this tends to slow down for most people as they age or advance in their careers.

In the beginning, we have time/energy, desire to learn/advance our skills. As these tendencies reduce over time, only the more hard-core/passionate remain.

So if say it's depends on this spectrum when asking knowledgeable programmers if they code at home. They might have already gone through that phase.

Yes but mostly learning novel technologies, and try it in some very small project or snippets.

These days I'm reading the little typer and there's a dependent type language named Pie in it. It's really a pleasant to read.

Things like this I probably no chance to learn and use at work for tens of years. So I have to do it off-work.

Only when I want to learn something I am very much interested in, which is rare.

I transitioned into tech without a CS degree and did a great deal of coding at home outside of my day job to learn. At first my day job was tutoring, then customer support and some dev work, then a junior programming position, and now a software engineering position at a big tech co. Up until my current job I was always building projects and grinding outside of my work hours.

At the big tech co I learn a great deal and do a lot of programming during the day, and I now enjoy a healthier work/life balance and spend time on the rest of my life. I also don't have that same "break into the industry" need, which is very freeing.

I do all of the computer programming at home.

I work from home somewhat regularly, so on those days I'll code at home for sure.

If you're asking about doing personal coding projects outside of work then I only do that rarely. I do plenty of coding at work and generally want to decompress or do my own thing at home. Occasionally I'll try out a tutorial project or some small bit of learning, but that's typically it. If I wanted to seriously look for a new job I'd probably try to do something more.

I think many successful coders do not code at home. I do, and when I was a younger developer it wasn't a good thing. There needs to be a clean separation between work and home. Now that I am older I am better at keeping a separation between work and home. I can even work from home and keep a clean separation now strangely enough.

I love to code at home and it's very important to me. I've had many hobby projects over the years. Aside from fulfilling a curiosity to learn and experiment with things that may not be directly relevant to my day job, I find that when work gets stressful coding in my spare time helps keep me grounded and helps me relax. Until fairly recently I used to have periods where I'd have to put in a lot of hours at work ahead of a deadline or release and I believe having my own projects to focus on in what little spare time I did have also helped prevent burnout - it's a nice reminder that I have my own thing going outside of my day job.

No. I devoted 5 years to study computer science. I won’t program if it’s not getting paid for. Separation of work and private life is important for me.

I only ever code at home when I'm prepping for an interview.