by Bozho | May 23, 2018 | Aggregated, developers, Opinions, side projects
Side projects are the things you do at home, after work, for your own “entertainment”, or to satisfy your desire to learn new stuff, in case your workplace doesn’t give you that opportunity (or at least not enough of it). Side projects are also a way to build stuff that you think is valuable but not necessarily “commercialisable”. Many side projects are open-sourced sooner or later and some of them contribute to the pool of tools at other people’s disposal. I’ve outlined one recommendation about side projects before – do them with technologies that are new to you, so that you learn important things that will keep you better positioned in the software world. But there are more benefits than that – serendipitous benefits, for example. And I’d like to tell some personal stories about that. I’ll focus on a few examples from my list of side projects to show how, through a sort-of butterfly effect, they helped shape my career. The computoser project, no matter how cool algorithmic music composition, didn’t manage to have much of a long term impact. But it did teach me something apart from niche musical theory – how to read a bulk of scientific papers (mostly computer science) and understand them without being formally trained in the particular field. We’ll see how that was useful later. Then there was the “State alerts” project – a website that scraped content from public institutions in my country (legislation, legislation proposals, decisions by regulators, new tenders, etc.), made them searchable, and “subscribable” – so that you get notified when a keyword of interest is mentioned in...
by Bozho | Dec 14, 2016 | Aggregated, contract, Developer tips, legal, Opinions, side projects
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default (in many countries, including mine) is that the creator owns the copyright, regardless of whether they were hired to do it or not. That in turn means that any side project, or in fact any intellectual property that you create while being employed as a developer, is automatically owned by your employer. This isn’t necessarily too bad, as most employers wouldn’t enforce their right, but this has bugged me ever since I started working for software companies. Even though I didn’t know the legal framework of copyright, the ownership clause in my contracts was always something that I felt was wrong. Even though Joel’s explanation makes perfect sense – companies need to protect their products from a random developer suddenly deciding they own the rights to parts of it – I’ve always thought there’s a middle ground. (Note: there is a difference between copyright, patents and trademarks, and the umbrella term “intellectual property” is kind of ambiguous. I may end up using it sloppily, so for a clarification, read here.) California apparently tried to fix this by passing the following law: Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise. But this...
by Bozho | Dec 14, 2016 | Aggregated, contract, Developer tips, legal, Opinions, side projects
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default (in many countries, including mine) is that the creator owns the copyright, regardless of whether they were hired to do it or not. That in turn means that any side project, or in fact any intellectual property that you create while being employed as a developer, is automatically owned by your employer. This isn’t necessarily too bad, as most employers wouldn’t enforce their right, but this has bugged me ever since I started working for software companies. Even though I didn’t know the legal framework of copyright, the ownership clause in my contracts was always something that I felt was wrong. Even though Joel’s explanation makes perfect sense – companies need to protect their products from a random developer suddenly deciding they own the rights to parts of it – I’ve always thought there’s a middle ground. (Note: there is a difference between copyright, patents and trademarks, and the umbrella term “intellectual property” is kind of ambiguous. I may end up using it sloppily, so for a clarification, read here.) California apparently tried to fix this by passing the following law: Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise. But this...
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