Dear FOSS devs, how do you manage to find time to do FOSS personal projects?
Does your company fund them or let you work on them on company time?
Or do you work less than 40hrs/week?
Do you get any significant income from Patreon or GitHub Sponsors?
I've strictly worked on a rule: Even if it's a lunch break or otherwise not company time, I don't even look at emails from Github on my phone. All my projects are outside hours, and never accessed from a company machine.
One of the key reasons I run my array of projects is specifically to experience running projects under my rules, with my own goals. I've had people try to lay down laws about why my projects need to "look more professional", which is usually some variation of "it should use MSSQL backend". I don't even use my real name in my Github account specifically so that these sort of claims don't have a leg to stand on.
"Does your company fund them or let you work on them on company time?"
I asked my company that during my interview 10 years ago. They told me they were working on setting up a policy to give back to the community since they use a lot of open source.
Never happened. I honestly doubt they were even writing a policy for it at the time.
By doing it with friends. We’ve written a bunch of Python packages, such as Django-GUID[1], ASGI-Correlation-ID[2], install-poetry GitHub action[3] etc... We’re a organization on GitHub with friends who do this together. Helps when multiple can answer GitHub issues etc.
I do write some open source for work, but that too is mostly done at my spare time.
No income, but I sponsor others. FOSS is mostly to learn and do something a bit different.
Company funds work on dependencies of their product. I monitor all the ones we use for critical issues and fix those. I also am the maintainer of some of the packages we use.
Separately I work on other things that affect me in my spare time.
I never do personal projects on my work machine or during work hours. I normally manage an hour or so 3 or 4 nights a week, maybe if I'm really into something, I'll stay up late and do a 4-5 hour sprint. I normally start about 10pm.
I get no income from them. I don't have Patreon or Sponsors or anything -- that's not what it's about, for me.
Evenings and weekends usually. I think it depends on time available to you, which varies with the kind of commitments you have (eg children, SO, pets).
I do it on my own time, and get no income from it, nor am I looking to. That allows me to keep an erratic schedule in case I'm busy with something else.
Interesting. May be a correlation rather than causation thing. For example if your dopamine levels are elevated for some unrelated reason then you may be experiencing more motivation hence the work on your FOSS projects and you may also experience increased sex drive at the same time.
One of the key reasons I run my array of projects is specifically to experience running projects under my rules, with my own goals. I've had people try to lay down laws about why my projects need to "look more professional", which is usually some variation of "it should use MSSQL backend". I don't even use my real name in my Github account specifically so that these sort of claims don't have a leg to stand on.