I love both of my jobs (programming and writing) as long as I don't overdo it and take a lot of time off for other activities like hiking, kayaking, playing musical instruments, and cooking. I have another "down time" activity that is both fun and relaxing for me: studying things that help me with my jobs. For example, when I first adopted Ruby as my primary scripting language and also started developing using Rails, I spent a lot of time reading through the C implementation of Ruby, the Ruby libraries, and the Rails source code. I find this kind of study relaxing because there are no deliverables and things learned studying the implementation of tools I use really pays off in increased productivity and learning new programming idioms and techniques. I used to base a lot of my work on the Tomcat server and ten years ago I made a real effort to understand its implementation. When I was very young I worked as a systems programmer and kept source listings of interesting pa...

I have been doing a lot of customer work lately using Java EE 6 and Glassfish. Fairly nice development environment even if Java EE 6 is heavy on ceremony (but better than J2EE). Just for fun today I took small play apps I had written in Rails and Clojure + Compojure and shoe-horned them to run on Glassfish. Interesting exercise, but unless there is an overwhelming need to create a custom deployment setup, it is so much better to go with the flow and stick with well crafted and mature setups like Java and Java EE 6 Clojure + Compojure running with embedded Jetty behind nginx for serving static assets Rails app hosted on Heroku Web apps written in either Java or Python hosted on AppEngin using the supported frameworks etc. I must admit that I enjoy hacking not only code but also deployment schemes - enjoy it too much sometimes. Sometimes it is worthwhile, most often not.