One of the best ways I found of actually getting to write "complete" code outside of the job is to combine it with another hobby or an activity.
RC, home automation, every other silly thing you can make or teaching/volunteering at various places that do coding tutoring (schools, community centers, or even your own kids or family) might help you with that.
That said it only works if you like it, if you already considering programming to be a hobby, it's ok not to.
Not every profession needs to be also a hobby, and you don't need to spend your free time on your profession to be good at it.
I know plenty of developers that don't like technology that much and pretty much dislike IT related stuff specifically, and I know plenty of developers that spend every weekend cloning some project from hack a day.
Both of these groups consist of good, lesser, and poor developers and so far I haven't really seen any substantial statistical proof that hobby programming enables you to become a better developer.
There could be extreme cases in which being a "super weekend hacker" gives you some advantage, especially if you are a single digit employee at startup and you need to hack everything together like crazy without worrying about the finer details, like documentation, maintainability, performance and all the other things that separate a hack job from a product, if your entire professional programming career is about flying solo and pushing out MVP/POC's then effectively one could say you are being paid for a hobby.
But if you are a developer at a large company with an established development life cycle and methodology the small hacks you pick up from your hobby would not really be relevant, hacking micro services on the newest SBC over the weekend won't necessarily help you work better as part of a team, won't necessarily help you write better documentation, and won't necessarily help you adhere to strict coding practices.
RC, home automation, every other silly thing you can make or teaching/volunteering at various places that do coding tutoring (schools, community centers, or even your own kids or family) might help you with that.
That said it only works if you like it, if you already considering programming to be a hobby, it's ok not to.
Not every profession needs to be also a hobby, and you don't need to spend your free time on your profession to be good at it.
I know plenty of developers that don't like technology that much and pretty much dislike IT related stuff specifically, and I know plenty of developers that spend every weekend cloning some project from hack a day. Both of these groups consist of good, lesser, and poor developers and so far I haven't really seen any substantial statistical proof that hobby programming enables you to become a better developer.
There could be extreme cases in which being a "super weekend hacker" gives you some advantage, especially if you are a single digit employee at startup and you need to hack everything together like crazy without worrying about the finer details, like documentation, maintainability, performance and all the other things that separate a hack job from a product, if your entire professional programming career is about flying solo and pushing out MVP/POC's then effectively one could say you are being paid for a hobby.
But if you are a developer at a large company with an established development life cycle and methodology the small hacks you pick up from your hobby would not really be relevant, hacking micro services on the newest SBC over the weekend won't necessarily help you work better as part of a team, won't necessarily help you write better documentation, and won't necessarily help you adhere to strict coding practices.