[dragonwriter]

> Studying law isn't practicing law.

And doing side projects isn't practicing the trade that would be regulated if programming was a regulated profession.

> But working full-stress cases outside of your actual work?

Whoever said programming side projects should be “full-stress cases”?

[huffmsa]

> Whoever said programming side projects should be “full-stress cases”?

That's what the context is here. There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into. Because you love coding so much you can't stop.

Be it your future start-up, or contributing to an open source project (or 3).

Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices. Actually writing a project using it is another level of complexity.

It's the difference between reading and analyzing the arguments of a legal case and reconstructing and presenting the arguments yourself.

[dragonwriter]

> That's what the context is here.

I disagree.

> There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into.

There's a common notion that you should be doing practical learning, including side projects, outside of “normal” paid work. It is far less common, however, to encounter the idea that it should be near full-time hours (and it's not clear to me what “full-time effort” distinct from hours even could mean.)

> Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices.

No, it's not: in fact, this kind of professional reading is often expressly excluded from the definition of activities that apply to continuing legal education requirements. Lawyers do, as a practical matter, need to do the equivalent of what you are talking about, but in addition to not as their CLE requirement.

[pojzon]

My wife is an excellent lawyer. She spends "NOWHERE" the same amount of time as I do to stay in touch with whats happening in the field.

She has to read new laws once in a while (sometimes even once per year). To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.

I would not be lyin when i say being a good software developer (in the eyes of industry) costs you around 20h of work extra per week.

[TeMPOraL]

> To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.

No, you don't. To be relevant, you just have to know a little JavaScript. You can find a good-paying job with that.

What you described is something that's correlated with personal love in the craft, and which can help you get better at it (then again, it also makes you more frustrated about professional life). You can fake it, of course, if for some reason you feel you need to,.