I used to program a lot (12 hours a day) in the past, but I was is school that time. I don't remember how much programming I did when I started working, because my new hobby became Lego Technic design that time. I'm slowly getting out of that too, so maybe I'll get back to programming again if it's possible with kids (seems to be more possible than with a Lego hobby).
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How Much Do You Program Outside of Work?
Between 1 and 2 hours. Most generally 1 hour, in the train. I would like to have my work move more fast, but I'll always give priority to my little son.
At the time where i was alone i was coding almost everyday after the school/work many many hours paired with gaming - with max of 4-5 hours of sleep each day. Now it is totally different, i am married, got two kids and barely find time to code for myself at all. On some evenings my wife may be out or gets in bed early so i may have a few hours - but even then i mostly dont have enough motivation to do anything at all and end up watching random videos or play games.
But sometimes i am in a blast and make good progress, but these are very very rare and will mostly occur on the weekend.
I think right now playing with my kids is much more valuable than creating a boring platforming game, but i hope to integrate my almost 7 year old daughter into my game more. I even made a little princess platformer for her, so she gets better at moving a charater around ;-)
8 hours ago, Finalspace said:I think right now playing with my kids is much more valuable than creating a boring platforming game, but i hope to integrate my almost 7 year old daughter into my game more. I even made a little princess platformer for her, so she gets better at moving a charater around ;-)
When my sister's kids were old enough to start doing chores, I wrote a basic platformer game that gave points for doing household tasks. I used their names and surroundings in the game to make it special to them. We made a set of tokens that they would get for doing real world tasks, with values that corresponded to the amount of points they'd get in the game if they did the same task, and at the end of the week, they could trade their tokens in for pocket money. It seemed to work quite well.
edit:
The only part I remember well is that for the vacuuming part of the game, your parents had gone out, and while they were gone, you'd made a lot of mess. You see them coming home down the street, and know you've got 60 seconds to vacuum all the piles of dirt before the front door opens.
I put in about 40 hours a week programming at home, as a hobby. I have the benefit of living in the middle of nowhere (No social activities, no entertainment for 60 miles) and working for a construction contractor who's not exactly loaded with work, so plenty of spare time on my hands and I'm shootin' to have my code work for me some day :^)
edit: I'm also a single and living on my own, so really.. plenty of spare time
Author
It seems that a lot of people here code quite a bit in their spare time. That's interesting. It wasn't something I quite expected. I guess I'm just odd in that I prefer 3d art/modeling instead. I've generally got one too many things to do in and generally not enough spare time to do it in.
But for a lot of people it also seems to vary a lot too. Interesting.
I tend to look at work as a way to pay my bills and stuff. It is not on my mind once I leave at the end of the day. So I go home and work quite a bit on the hobby project Francois DIY. It is a gaming environment like Steam, Mario Maker, and Mario Paint. The reason why I work on this is because later on I find it useful for stuff like making games, playing them, and getting people to make levels. I'm also taking interest in software packaging - putting the software on cd with a colorful label, making a box for the software with pictures depicting the software in action, and finally putting all that on eBay to see if people will actually buy it. Don't care if I make much money off of this but just the thought of it is cool. Even at work I'm thinking about what I could code!
Basically, to sum it up my software development hobby is my tech life and work is a side.
On 7/6/2017 at 6:47 AM, deltaKshatriya said:I guess I'm just odd in that I prefer 3d art/modeling instead.
I do a bit of that too, but when it comes right down to it, I'm good at programming and pretty bad at art 
I used to be eager to go home and start working on my side projects, which have included MHS (http://memoryhacking.com/feature.php), 3 versions of L. Spiro Engine (http://lspiroengine.com/), and more.
I would spend around 5 hours per day coding outside of work. Like ApochPiQ, I periodically switched to other activities. For a while just after moving to Japan I played piano for 5 hours daily.
As for why, it is because I was excited about the products I was creating. MHS has a huge following, and I was always eager to get a new feature into my software and see how everyone enjoyed it. My game engines were a way for me to explore new technologies, and maybe someday my latest one will be used by the public as well.
These days I am fairly burnt out, but am still working on a chess engine, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator, my engine, and a new version of MHS.
But I am getting burnt out on programming as a whole (hence why I have been inactive here lately), and am starting to shift towards a more creative career. I am working on publishing a manga, and if there is a conflict regarding my schedule between coding and working on the manga, the manga is likely to win. Not to mention I am still studying (at a school) piano, Japanese, and French, and am likely to enroll in economics and political courses soon in order to prepare for my 2020 campaign.
L. Spiro
Author
30 minutes ago, L. Spiro said:I used to be eager to go home and start working on my side projects, which have included MHS (http://memoryhacking.com/feature.php), 3 versions of L. Spiro Engine (http://lspiroengine.com/), and more.
I would spend around 5 hours per day coding outside of work. Like ApochPiQ, I periodically switched to other activities. For a while just after moving to Japan I played piano for 5 hours daily.
As for why, it is because I was excited about the products I was creating. MHS has a huge following, and I was always eager to get a new feature into my software and see how everyone enjoyed it. My game engines were a way for me to explore new technologies, and maybe someday my latest one will be used by the public as well.
These days I am fairly burnt out, but am still working on a chess engine, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator, my engine, and a new version of MHS.
But I am getting burnt out on programming as a whole (hence why I have been inactive here lately), and am starting to shift towards a more creative career. I am working on publishing a manga, and if there is a conflict regarding my schedule between coding and working on the manga, the manga is likely to win.
L. Spiro
Are you burnt out of programming now because of your job at the moment, or just in general from doing it over the years? I haven't been super interested in doing coding side projects for similar reasons: I just prefer to do 3d art. I'm not sure if I'm super good at it, but it's what I prefer at the moment.
33 minutes ago, L. Spiro said:Not to mention I am still studying (at a school) piano, Japanese, and French, and am likely to enroll in economics and political courses soon in order to prepare for my 2020 campaign.
What are you running for, out of curiosity?
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