Heh, I'll chime in as I did residency at a busy program and advanced my coding skills on the side. Even working 80hr+ weeks you find downtime. Some of that you use for sleeping and studying. With whatever's left, some of my co-residents liked to read. Others had sort of social lives outside the hospital. For me, I coded with most of my freetime. It helped scratch an itch-- problems are solved with 100% certainty, errors can be found with testing preventing many mistakes before they actually affect people, you can build something with your creative juices and get a level of independence not possible in medicine... The list goes on. But my point is, residency is demanding, but you still have a little downtime here and there.

To parent and others, with due respect, I assumed that the OP was a professional software developer, based on the phrasing about using software to pay bills. Coding on your own time is more so a hobby, but as soon as you try to make money from it, even consulting on the side, the hours pile up. There's opening your own business, contracting, soliciting clients, meetings, status updates... way more than just the programming aspect.

So in these cases, we talking coding as a hobby, or coding as a profession alongside medicine?

I did a prelim-surgery intern year. The hours are worse than medicine, but there are way less "mandatory" activities (no lectures, no endless rounding, etc.). For the most part, you're on the floor waiting for pages. I used the time between pages to write code.

Now I'm a radiology resident and have much more time.

> the time between pages to write code.

Makes me feel like a slacker for not studying medicine or law while I'm waiting for my code to compile.

Someone make this: a plugin for an IDE that pops up a page from a whitelist (probably of documentation, but it could be anything you want to study) whenever you compile.

Don't forget. He also had time to browse HN...

All those wasted sword fights. https://3d.xkcd.com/303/

I did my master's degree in computer science at Stanford, but now I'm a radiology resident at the University of Washington in Seattle.

That's pretty impressive. My time between pages was spent asleep or reading reddit/HN.

Are you in the Bay Area? Would love to learn more about your experience.

There is time for life outside of residency. My wife started residency with a 5 month old and had another child half way through, this delayed her graduation a total of 4 weeks.

Good work supporting her. I'm sure that played a large factor. I suspect a single mom would have a much tougher time.

While that's very encouraging to hear, that depends wildly on what program and specialty you are in. West coast vs East Coast plays a role too.

Peds/OBGYN/IM/Derm and most female dominated specialties you see this.

Neurosurgery, Ortho, Gen surg, etc not so much.

I have outmost respect for this type of dedication. Amazing!

I have a friend who is a resident and is the mother of 2 young children. That’s way more work than being a software developer. You find a way.