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0 pointsquaunaut8y ago0 comments

I appreciate the response.

As to some specific points:

> Techniques to minimize failure are quite literally a matter of survival in a professional context; they are often an afterthought in a personal project. Fault prevention and tolerance are often the most difficult characteristics to achieve in any sufficiently complex software system, and their prioritization or lack thereof has an enormous impact on virtually every aspect of working on such a system.

See, I almost see this as backwards. My personal projects often depend on only myself to maintain survival, and I didn't put all that time in to see them go by the wayside so easily. This means I build in tools and resources to help put them up and keep them up, because I'm the only one who can. In a professional context, I've often seen team members not consider these issues because once it's out, it's someone else's problem- if it causes downtime, DevOps, if it's a simple bug, whoever takes the ticket.

> Your employer may not care about letting technical debt pile up indefinitely as long as you can keep cranking out new features and meeting deadlines, code quality be damned. Alternatively, your employer may impose onerous processes to ensure code quality and integrity that aren't really necessary or effective, and which may even be counterproductive. In fact, there's a good chance your employer will understand very little about what you do at all and make demands that are incongruent with technical realities, which you must deal with, sometimes by performing pointless tasks solely to appease them.

While certainly true, this is also something I would never expect someone on my team to be proud of. This is a shameful act, and done often enough leads to the departure of good talent. I expect management(including myself) to do it's job: Manage. This means not taking advantage of your employees often enough to make it a norm.

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However, the thing I keep noticing about a lot of these is a certain level of assumption of what a personal project entails. That you may be producing something with significant technical debt, that you are coding in a way that isn't trying to work best with others, that you're not aiming for revenue or having to work under unrealistic constraints. Personally, I code at home the same way I code at work: With quality and hope that it will continue to have a life long into the future. Sometimes I don't return to projects for months- and I want to be able to pick them up the way I put them down. The other thing I recognize, is the kind of experience that has to do with working with others- something most personal projects certainly don't approach, but I don't look for them to solve it. Team experience still matters, I just also think personal projects mean something for technical experience.

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not_kurt_godel8y ago

> My personal projects often depend on only myself to maintain survival, and I didn't put all that time in to see them go by the wayside so easily.

That's great, but when push comes to shove, you can and will ignore an intractable issue in a personal project until you feel like working on it again. With a job, consistently ignoring issues can endanger your career and thereby, eventually, your ability to provide for yourself. (And to me, being a parasite who punts issues like you describe is hardly a better existence even if you're able to get away with it.)

> While certainly true, this is also something I would never expect someone on my team to be proud of. This is a shameful act, and done often enough leads to the departure of good talent. I expect management(including myself) to do it's job: Manage. This means not taking advantage of your employees often enough to make it a norm.

Sometimes accumulating technical debt is a more pragmatic option in the bigger picture - what I'm describing isn't necessarily a universally bad thing (although it often is bad); the point is that professional and personal projects have fundamentally different priorities and that they require different skills and approaches to navigate effectively.

> However, the thing I keep noticing about a lot of these is a certain level of assumption of what a personal project entails. That you may be producing something with significant technical debt, that you are coding in a way that isn't trying to work best with others, that you're not aiming for revenue or having to work under unrealistic constraints.

You are validating this assumption with statements like this:

> Sometimes I don't return to projects for months- and I want to be able to pick them up the way I put them down.

When you are in production with real customers, you rarely have the option to do this. It's great to strive to adopt good practices in your personal projects, but when shit hits the fan at 3am, you're not going to get out of bed and fix it unless you have some real skin in the game, and you're not going to be truly motivated to code as if that's a real possibility (That means having: runbooks, paging, escalations, dashboards, metrics, alarms, gradual rollouts, time windowing, calendar blackouts, rollbacks, multi-step deployments, canaries, tech-ops, feature toggling, A/B testing, backup/restore, DNS safeguards, load balancing, SLAs, pentesting, failover, status reporting through 3rd-party channel, etc. etc.). I never said personal projects don't mean anything for technical experience; they certainly do. But that doesn't mean they're representative of professional experience either.

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