Ask HN: How do you manage to do FOSS personal projects?
Dear FOSS devs, how do you manage to find time to do FOSS personal projects?
Does your company fund them or let you work on them on company time?
Or do you work less than 40hrs/week?
Do you get any significant income from Patreon or GitHub Sponsors?
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One of the key reasons I run my array of projects is specifically to experience running projects under my rules, with my own goals. I've had people try to lay down laws about why my projects need to "look more professional", which is usually some variation of "it should use MSSQL backend". I don't even use my real name in my Github account specifically so that these sort of claims don't have a leg to stand on.
I asked my company that during my interview 10 years ago. They told me they were working on setting up a policy to give back to the community since they use a lot of open source.
Never happened. I honestly doubt they were even writing a policy for it at the time.
I do write some open source for work, but that too is mostly done at my spare time.
No income, but I sponsor others. FOSS is mostly to learn and do something a bit different.
[1] https://github.com/snok/django-guid
[2] https://github.com/snok/asgi-correlation-id
[3] https://github.com/snok/install-poetry
Separately I work on other things that affect me in my spare time.
I never do personal projects on my work machine or during work hours. I normally manage an hour or so 3 or 4 nights a week, maybe if I'm really into something, I'll stay up late and do a 4-5 hour sprint. I normally start about 10pm.
I get no income from them. I don't have Patreon or Sponsors or anything -- that's not what it's about, for me.
I do it on my own time, and get no income from it, nor am I looking to. That allows me to keep an erratic schedule in case I'm busy with something else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU