My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies.

I agree. Funny story, I wasn’t allowed to do code reviews at my current job for about 2 years because they thought my comb was too fine. Suddenly software quality is something they are really valuing and they’re allowing me to do code reviews again. Funny, that.

As a developer, I literally laughed hard enough to choke a little.

I just moved to the Thunder app from Sync myself. Honestly, I still think the Sync UI is better, but I also know it’s pretty out of date. I know the dev often takes extended breaks, but I am tired of the complete lack of any communication. At this point, I have no reason to think that they are going to come back and push a newupdate for Sync. If they do, I will switch back, at least for a while.

Is it because *gestures broadly in liberal American*?

Based on what you said, these are not required for you to do your job, only for you to improve your position. It is not unreasonable for you to use personal time for self-improvement. It’s also not unreasonable for you to use company downtime for self-improvement.