Private projects a necessity?
Apparently, some companies make it more or less mandatory for their applicants to have one or more private projects that they are working on and being proud of. I have been one of those people that gets completely engulfed in work for my employer for quite long stretches of time. It certainly does not seem impossible to be among the best developers without having private projects and some dreams of creating a startup with at least one of them. I can tell for certain that it is possible to meet people at your workplace that are significantly less interested in our field of work without spending hardly any time on private projects for years on end. For some reason people I meet that only seem to think about creating software when they are at work prefer microsoft windows to a larger degree.
Anyways, I have tried to see the advantages, especially in the long term of pouring my extra energy into private projects rather than trying to excel at my workplace. I now think that I might be less frustrated with the shortcomings or lack of ambition of my peers. The strong longing for using better tools - especially compilers - I can get access to way easier. Some more blogging might help too I guess. At this time I plan to use github and bintray. And if I don’t find something better I will use a jenkins instance on my personal server for building. Already this looks significantly better compared to what I have at my workplace. As a project I plan to rewrite an old project I worked on during my days in the students commune that I inherited from previous students but this time in a functional language.