Standard clause about company resources in my contract, plus a management profile I cannot inspect. I have been writing the project on it at night because it is the machine I have, and I know that is dumb.
What I do not know is what the minimum viable fix is. Is a cheap second laptop enough on its own, or is it the accounts and the network that actually matter?
Not a lawyer, and this varies wildly by country and contract. But from watching a few of these go sideways: the second laptop does not fix an overbroad clause, it just makes your story clean and boring. The clauses that bite tend to key on company time, company resources, and 'the field of business', and hardware is only one of those three.
The move most people skip is simply asking. A short, specific email - here is the thing, here is why it does not compete, may I work on it on my own time and equipment - gets a yes far more often than the internet suggests, and a written yes is worth more than any amount of laptop hygiene.
Can confirm on asking. I assumed the answer would be no and sat on it for a year. When I finally asked, I had a written 'sure, just do not sell it to our customers' back in four hours. The year of quietly worrying was the expensive part.
Second machine, personal email, personal hotspot, personal password manager. Four things, one afternoon. Do not sync anything between the two, including the browser.
Costed mine out when I did the same thing: refurbished laptop $210, own domain and mailbox about $6/month, second GitHub account free, phone hotspot already paid for. Under $300 once and about $70 a year after. Against the amount of low-grade anxiety it removed, it was the cheapest purchase of that whole year.
One thing that gets suggested a lot and does not actually solve your problem: a cheap cloud dev box with a remote editor session. You are still typing into a managed device. Keystrokes, clipboard, screen, whatever the profile is configured to see - all still on their side of the line. A remote box only helps if your concern is 'source code sitting on disk', which is the smallest part of this.
Small thing that took me embarrassingly long to sort out - the git author email. I had months of commits on my side project stamped with my work address because that was in my global config. The fix is a conditional include in your gitconfig keyed on the directory, so anything under ~/projects/personal uses the personal identity automatically and you never have to remember. Worth checking your existing history for the wrong email too. If the repo is already public, leaving it alone is better than rewriting history and breaking every link, but for a private repo you may as well clean it up now.
@perlite_pete · 4mo ago · 2 replies
The machine is the easy half and the cheap half. A refurbished business laptop from three or four years ago is under $250 and will happily run an editor and a browser.
The half people forget is accounts and network. If your personal email is signed into the work browser profile, if your project repo is under a GitHub account you also use for work SSO, if you are on the corporate wifi or VPN while pushing, if any of it ever touched the company cloud drive - the second laptop has not bought you much. Separate machine, separate email on your own domain, separate git identity, your own connection. Assume anything that happens on the managed device is inventoried, because that is what those tools are for.
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@pgpolicy_nadia · 4mo ago
Have administered a fleet, can confirm the boring version of this: default configs commonly report installed applications and often browser extensions, and it is all timestamped. Nobody is reading your commits for entertainment. But if there is ever a dispute, that inventory is sitting right there and it is dated, which is exactly when you do not want it to exist.
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