I have been professionally working for ~5 years now as a Software Engineer / Developer.

In all this time, I have gone to offices rarely. I like working from my desk at home.

In general, my desk isn’t fancy. It’s a monitor, a laptop on a stand, a custom mechanical keyboard and the cheapest wired mouse I can buy.

Over the years there’s been another addition to this desk, ‘an underdesk computer’ which acts as my homeserver.

I have been adding more things to my posessions over the years like a RTL-SDR module, Raspberry Pi boards and a bunch of sensors for it. Needless to say, I spend a lot of non-work time with these objects.

For someone else working as a librarian, their home might not have a lot of books or their life might not involve taking care of books after work, unlike in my case.

They could be woodworking in their spare time. So, what is their profession? A librarian, a woodworker, A mix of the two?

I like to think of the latter. I like to think that besides the woodworking setup, there are a few books in a shelf, some about woodworking, some about catalogues and discovery of books, etc. And when this person comes home from work, to this setup in their garage, they feel nice. This feeling is very similar but subdued version of greeting your spouse, kids, after work, or your parents in a weekend. They are your home afterall.

I propose a name for this setup you have built, let’s call it “Your professional home”.

Your profession is not just your current job, it’s related to the skills you have and the value you generate for humankind with these skills. I’m sure after some time the librarian can generate money by crafting a chair. At that point in time, they are professionally both a librarian and a woodworker. (And they can help index and find a book on Woodworking even faster)

One may switch jobs, one may switch careers, but the “professional home” stays mostly coherent throughout a person’s life.

Personally, when I have some spare time and I ssh into this home server to monitor something or do some house-keeping, I feel like it greets me back, just like when someone removes the dust-cover of a motorbike and it greets their owner back.

I know it’s just a few dumb CRUD services, but having this miniature ‘professional home’ makes me dream of more, to extend it further, and someday, maybe someday.. power my flying exoskeleton.

It need not have to be a full-fledged rack server with redundancy for its redundancy, something as simple as your expense sheet or your Obsidian directory can also be a part of your “professional home”.

A lot of people I’ve met in my life who take pride in their work tend to have such professional homes.

“So in my professional home, I want to study about Load Balancers that’s critical to one of my tasks in the upcoming sprint.”

I think that’s stretching the line slightly too far. And you should avoid doing any short-term work related to your current job in this space.

How is it different from “hobbies”, you may ask.

I don’t know, honestly. Out of all your hobbies, you may pick the top 1-2 things you’re good at which directly helped you in one of the jobs that you had , and add it to your professional home.

Some things like watching football games, don’t add direct value in my professional life, so there is a clear sign that this one is a hobby.

On the other hand, if one of your hobbies is technical writing, it may be part of your professional home if you’re a knowledge worker – because typically you have to know a thing or two about written communication to be successful.