During work hours we developers put our effort, creativity, time and energy into creating pages, features, fixes and improvements for our boss and our clients. After work we often are tired from working, have dinner to cook, groceries to do, household chores to attend to, sports and social life requesting our time and energy. However, it can be super beneficial to code in your free time as well. Here are 5 reasons why I love coding in my own time as well.

1. Learning

In your own project you don’t have coworkers and are mostly on your own when you have to figure things out. At work you usually have less time to figure it out yourself and turn to a coworker to solve a challenge at some point. This saves valuable company time and money, but sometimes it is good to struggle with something on your own for a while. I feel it teaches you not to give up too quickly by reaching out for a fast fix and instead pushes yourself in search of the limits of your skills. And hopefully it pushes those boundaries further out.

I have been fortunate to have worked for companies that believe in lifelong learning. While they have always supported me in learning, even watching videos to catch up on a language I hadn’t worked in for a while, I always feel like this shouldn’t take too much time. In your own time, you can relax a bit more in this and take all the time you want or need to get through a tutorial, a video or a digital course. Putting these into practice in your own projects ensures that you retain what you learned so much better.

2. Experimenting

At work there might not be time, space or the option to experiment with new tech, a new library or framework. In your own time, you can set up a project just to try out a new framework, or install a plugin and see if you can get it working and mess around with it. This is something I think we should do more often as it always provides experience and knowledge. It doesn’t have to go right or be a success, it can be a total bust, but still, you’ve learned something and have tried it.  

Experimenting is closely tied to learning, but the goal of the experiment is not necessarily to learn and understand something fully, but more to play and try stuff out and see where that leads. This leads to more original ideas and solutions in my opinion, where learning is more focused on understanding how a specific tech works exactly.

3. Creativity

Working on your own projects allows complete creative freedom; having a parrot chase the mouse across the screen and add a bunch of easter eggs for all kinds of holidays. Clients usually don’t opt for these features, but if I want to, I can build them anyway in my own project (I’m not saying parrot cursors are a good idea). You can be as creative with your code as you want and nobody will reject the ideas. It is fun to create things that work a little different than the web usually does things. It all comes back to playing again. If you can dream it, you can try to code it too!

4. Freedom

Clients, product owners and designers all have ideas on what the feature should look and behave like. In your own projects, if something doesn’t really work out quite the way you want it to, you can just come up with a completely different solution. A section not looking quite well on certain screen sizes? Instead of fidgeting with it endlessly to get it like the design, you can just rearrange the whole section, or remove it completely if you want to. It’s your project.

5. Portfolio

When you want to change jobs, it is good to have a portfolio that shows your code, ideas and experience. Especially if the code you wrote at your previous job is not open source or in some way available to see for a new employer. Or if you want to start working as a freelancer, a portfolio helps to show others what you are capable of and whether you are possibly a good fit for their project.

There you go, 5 solid reasons why working on your own projects is important for your future growth. Besides the fact that it is just a lot of fun! Share a personal project you're working on, or if you know another reason to add to this list.