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Discussion on: Do I need to do private side projects to be/become a professional web developer?

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Christopher Miles • Edited

In my opinion, if you're working a full time development job you probably do not have a lot of time for side projects. After a day of engaging work, you likely want to eat dinner and spend time with your family or zone out in front of the TV.

That said, I think it could be somewhat beneficial to have some activity on your GitHub (or similar) page. There are some work related activities that could help with your activity! If you run into an issue with a library or framework you use, often that project is on GitHub and you can add your two cents to an existing issue or open a new one. If it's really critical to your work, maybe you can fork it and offer a pull request to the project. In my experience, most managers don't have an issue with this as long as your other work isn't neglected.

While it happens less often, there may be code that you've worked on that your company will let you open source. A specialized parser, for instance, could be orthogonal to your company's business and community patches can only help keep the code up-to-date and relevant.

Certainly none of us should feel pressure to create a project just to increase our activity on GitHub.