> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies, mentoring the other developers, helping the team to grow, but I was doing this just because I liked my job. I was not considering this as something important in my career, simply because I didn’t want too. To develop my career, I was spending a lot of time outside work reading technical books, doing toy projects, going to meetups, browsing Hacker News.

This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment.

> Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial.

A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great.

So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do well in a time effective manner. My take-aways are two fold: 1. on a macro scale, we should work harder to build a better systematic base to work from, and 2. a lot of side projects are over-invested in. As a chronic maker-of-side-projects, knowing how to put something down & walk away is a crucial skill. Unlike the author, I do think there's a quite considerable value in having some shallow experience, including with things you are not likely to use (understanding the meta-patterns of computing, seeing similarities across systems is where mature understanding starts).

> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News.

An imo unfortunate & accurate statement of a dwindling spirit of the technical community! We have heavily industrialized[1] these days, & our hunger to explore outer bounds & interesting potential is much diminished. As a result, those of us who are pioneering by nature are less in demand, more settlers and town planners are needed[2]. For now, we are "technically mature", we believe we have "good solutions" to the problems that are common & identified. For this to shift, we need more cause for adventure, more sense that computing has bigger open possibilities than what we've settled down around. I for one continue to believe the future is still exciting.

[1] https://daverupert.com/2020/01/the-web-is-industrialized-and...

[2] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...