I've seen surveys that have open fields like that before but they usual use some keyword analysis to distil the results down (though I've always been sceptical how well their NLPs interpret messages like "I always use for personal projects" and "I never use for personal projects" as polar opposites despite the similar wording).

Anyhow, in this instance you're right that there isn't even a need for open fields, there's enough examples online already of IT being separated into distinct sectors for field selection on forms.

But what really grated me the most about the results was that there didn't even seem to be any deduping of the results (or if there was, it was case sensitive):

    ("Everything" "everything")
    ("Personal" "projects")
    ("web development" "Web development")

And there was even an instance where prototyping appeared twice because one instance had \s afterwards!