The most important message here is "take care of yourself" near the bottom. I want to share a story about how I did a moonlight effort the wrong way.
I treated it like a second job. When my day job was finished, I started my second job working on a game with a team of coworkers and friends. We were working crazy hours, but we were crushing it. Before long we got the attention of Amazon who wanted to acquire our game as part of their Fire phone launch. Our game focused heavily on motion controls which was perfect for the direction they were taking the phone (they were really pushing the envelope with motion + cameras + other sensor fusion things). We worked even harder. Before long we had a meeting with Jeff Blackburn. He showed it off to Bezos and got signoff to acquire us. We worked even harder. Contracts were signed and due diligence started.
Then our lead dev died.
Amazon backed out as we had no way of completing the game on time. We had poured everything into this game with the intention that the payoff would be worth it. We never prioritized enjoyment of what we were doing or our own health. Our mistake was we hadn't left room for failure.
Whatever you do, ensure you have gas left in the tank for when things go wrong. Things will always go wrong in ways you'll never be able to plan for. If you stretch yourself to the limit, when a bump in the road hits you you'll break and everything/everyone around you will suffer.
I now have a far, far healthier approach to moonlighting. I try and work a little bit every day on something. It doesn't need to be 5 hours of work - 20 minutes is enough. I've been working on something for the last 3 years or so and while it doesn't have the velocity that that game did, it makes me happy while I work on it. If it fails, it's OK because I find joy in doing it. Success isn't a requirement.
It was a question we all asked ourselves many times, but it's hard to say. He was diagnosed with an extremely aggresive stage 4 cancer and was given a couple weeks to live. Whether or not he would have seen a doctor earlier had we not been in crunch mode is uncertain.
I treated it like a second job. When my day job was finished, I started my second job working on a game with a team of coworkers and friends. We were working crazy hours, but we were crushing it. Before long we got the attention of Amazon who wanted to acquire our game as part of their Fire phone launch. Our game focused heavily on motion controls which was perfect for the direction they were taking the phone (they were really pushing the envelope with motion + cameras + other sensor fusion things). We worked even harder. Before long we had a meeting with Jeff Blackburn. He showed it off to Bezos and got signoff to acquire us. We worked even harder. Contracts were signed and due diligence started.
Then our lead dev died.
Amazon backed out as we had no way of completing the game on time. We had poured everything into this game with the intention that the payoff would be worth it. We never prioritized enjoyment of what we were doing or our own health. Our mistake was we hadn't left room for failure.
Whatever you do, ensure you have gas left in the tank for when things go wrong. Things will always go wrong in ways you'll never be able to plan for. If you stretch yourself to the limit, when a bump in the road hits you you'll break and everything/everyone around you will suffer.
I now have a far, far healthier approach to moonlighting. I try and work a little bit every day on something. It doesn't need to be 5 hours of work - 20 minutes is enough. I've been working on something for the last 3 years or so and while it doesn't have the velocity that that game did, it makes me happy while I work on it. If it fails, it's OK because I find joy in doing it. Success isn't a requirement.