[watwut]

> You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing?

Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense.

To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises.

At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.

[pydry]

>If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more.

A) I'm pretty sure almost nobody actually codes 8 hours at work.

B) Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.

[watwut]

> I'm pretty sure almost nobody actually codes 8 hours at work.

The non-coding parts of work are necessary on oss projects too. In any case, programmers work being mostly coding + code review is pretty normal.

> Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.

That is nowhere near guaranteed and more likely to not be true. In particular, if you focus on maintaining the same software, it will be more of the same after a while.

[pydry]

>The non-coding parts of work are necessary on oss projects too.

IME a far greater % is coding. There's also a lot of OSS people involved who don't code who help out with the other stuff.

Moreover, a lot of the stuff that "isn't coding" is a strong quality signal - how the developer interacts with bug reports for instance.

>That is nowhere near guaranteed and more likely to not be true. In particular, if you focus on maintaining the same software.

It'll still be different to what you do at your day job and will necessitate picking up a different set of skills and a different perspective.

[watwut]

> IME a far greater % is coding. There's also a lot of OSS people involved who don't code who help out with the other stuff.

It was not my experience. In work, the proportion of coding was bigger then when I maintained open source one. Mostly because company paid people to do other stuff. In OSS, afaik, it is was more of rare to have dedicated tester or to get already analyzed input. Also, the planning, organization, documentation, keeping tickets clean, decision making and so on are all on you. The ratio of project work is the same.

> It'll still be different to what you do at your day job and will necessitate picking up a different set of skills and a different perspective.

Maybe yes, maybe not. And after a while of maintaining the same software, you already maxed out what you learned. Moreover, you can learn new stuff without having side project. It has advantages, because then you dont have to finish and polish stuff. You just learn or try what interests you.

Lastly, side project is really not that dissimilar then working on the job - meaning job+side amounts to 10 hours a day work basically. It means your hourly effectivity will go down exactly like all studies on crunch predicts. You will get tired and slow.