How much time should you spend working on side projects?
Recorded – watch the full episode on YouTube.
Being a full time Swift developer, how much time do you invest working on your side projects?
Kaya Thomas: That's a really good question. And it's something that I've still been learning to try to figure out. I think, a couple of hours per week and it's a bit different with We Read Too, because a couple of hours per week may not be development hours, it may be moderating, there's a suggestion feature in the app where users can suggest books to be added to the directory. And so I have to look through those myself and check to see if they're valid suggestions and then add those and things. And so there's more than just the development aspect when it comes to We Read Too.
“I think a lot of it is don't putting too much pressure on yourself to feel like you have to be working on your side project all the time.”
It may be a couple of hours per week, I think that it just depends on your own kind of how much do you work at work? And what are your obligations outside of work? What are your hobbies outside of work? And things and balancing it, right? I think, when I first started working full time, I definitely didn't know how to kind of balance that out because when you're first working full time for the first time, it's trying to learn how to organize and time manage your life is kind of tough. And so I definitely didn't work on We Read Too for like the first year or so when I first started working full time. I think that it definitely depends you have to get your groove. I think a lot of it is don't putting too much pressure on yourself to feel like you have to be working on your side project all the time.
Paul Hudson: I mean now presumably you're at home, you've got time on your hands.
Kaya Thomas: I am, I am at home. It's funny. One of the projects that I'm trying to work for We Read Too right now is, I had mentioned that I started out with Parse and a lot of us may know that Parse was bought by Facebook and then Facebook decided to deprecate Parse. And Parse was back end as a service, great to use, they had great SDKs and especially for a beginning developer. It allowed me to really get started off the ground without understanding service side development or how to do databases, all that kind of stuff. I really loved using it and then they deprecated it. When they deprecated it I actually decided to keep using the client side code by running my own Parse server. I was running my own Parse server on Heroku, and then I migrated the data over to mLabs. And now mLabs is owned by MongoDB and they're deprecating mLabs. What I'm doing now is I'm actually I moved over all the data to the CloudKit.
Paul Hudson: All right, folks, that's your advanced warning, get off CloudKit before they kill CloudKit because the curse of Kaya Thomas has come towards CloudKit next!
Kaya Thomas: Hopefully not! Figures crossed, fingers crossed. I moved all the data to CloudKit and so now I'm trying to wire that up in the app and figure out how to use it for my Android, because I do have an Android version of the app as well. Not that I developed, a great Android developer Julia Nguyen developed the Android version, but figure it out, making sure I can hook up the Android version to the CloudKit database. And so that's kind of my project right now.
This transcript was recorded as part of Swiftly Speaking. You can watch the full original episode on YouTube, or subscribe to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
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