TL; DR:
Building Software Outside of Work Hours
This topic gets people weirdly emotional.
On one side, you have the crowd that treats side projects like a moral requirement. If you aren't coding after work, you are falling behind, you don't want it enough, and you are basically doomed. On the other side, you have people who act like building anything outside of work is automatically unhealthy, or that anyone who does it must be compensating for something.
Both extremes are missing the point.
You don't need to build software outside of working hours to be a legitimate software engineer. Your life does not have to revolve around your job. You can love software and still want to spend your evenings with your family, at the gym, playing games, reading, or doing literally anything that has nothing to do with code. That is normal. That is healthy. And it does not make you less serious as a developer.
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