Well, it has to be fun. I caught the fun side projects bug when I first bought my Apple II (serial number 71, an early one) and wrote a simple Chess program that Apple gave away with their demo software cassette tape. I then wrote a Basic adventure game Valley of the Drawf that I gave away on America Online an a ton of people downloaded.
In another form: for the last 30 years, I have consistently spent about 10 hours a week of my own time (easy to do since I have just worked part time for almost my entire career) researching interesting tech, usually AI related. I write lots of small code experiments and a small percentage of these get cleaned up and used as examples in books I write. Again, this is all a lot of fun for me, and my wife participates by being my editor - something she also enjoys.
When to call it quits on hobby coding projects? When it gets to be what a friend of mine calls “negative fun.” An example: on Sunday I was scratching an itch writing something in Chez Scheme on my M1 Mac. It was a minor hassle getting everything installed but an hour later I hit a road block using bindings to sqlite3 - something that should be easy, but my compiled for M1/ARM Chez Scheme code kept trying to find and load Intel/X86 libraries. Could I have sorted this out? You bet I could but the process devolved into “negative fun” so I stopped.
In another form: for the last 30 years, I have consistently spent about 10 hours a week of my own time (easy to do since I have just worked part time for almost my entire career) researching interesting tech, usually AI related. I write lots of small code experiments and a small percentage of these get cleaned up and used as examples in books I write. Again, this is all a lot of fun for me, and my wife participates by being my editor - something she also enjoys.
When to call it quits on hobby coding projects? When it gets to be what a friend of mine calls “negative fun.” An example: on Sunday I was scratching an itch writing something in Chez Scheme on my M1 Mac. It was a minor hassle getting everything installed but an hour later I hit a road block using bindings to sqlite3 - something that should be easy, but my compiled for M1/ARM Chez Scheme code kept trying to find and load Intel/X86 libraries. Could I have sorted this out? You bet I could but the process devolved into “negative fun” so I stopped.