If you are using the concepts and writing the code yourself, you’re fine. If you are copying/pasting code from work to your personal project, you’re commiting IP theft. I’d recommend never doing that. On the otherhand, if it is for a peraonal project that you will never give away or sell, no one will know. Id still recommend not doing it, but to each their own.

Do whatever you want. Someone has learned something from you at some point. That’s how life works

That’s kind of how experience works. More experience usually means more pay. If one doesn’t take what they learned from previous employment, then they are stealing from their current employer.

Also, who gives a fuck about your former employer’s IP? You don’t get paid enough to lick the boots of some corporation who isn’t paying you.

Clone the whole repo and reference it when you need.

It’s highly likely main engineer “stole” them from the guy that taught him. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s just how learning and experience work.

ideas are not protected by copyright.

Assuming you implement it yourself, you’re totally fine lol.

On a more ethical note, something something all source code should be free something GNU something.

If it’s simply good coding practice, then you’re fine.

If you’re cloning an API, that might be a violation. If you’re copying blocks of code, that’s definitely a violation. The fact that someone else actually wrote it in the first place is also an obvious signal that the code went from work to your personal project, and not vice versa.

If you’re still working there and want to continue to do so, I’d suggest reviewing your employment agreement and NDAs. Some employers have you sign an agreement that anything you write while employed belongs to them, others explicitly prevent you from using any ideas/use cases that you’re working on at work for outside applications.

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Imagine if I couldn’t use what I learned from work in my side projects. All of them would have looked like I just finished uni

I see this as part of the experience one has.

My rule is to not take anything that has information from the client.

For example I generally just create a txt file with a few example of “how to do this or that”. Generic stuff. So next time it takes me much less time to do the same thing.

As a general rule, any code you write on company time and on company resources belongs to the company.

But I think some common sense still applies. If you wrote some autohotkey or shell script that has nothing to do with the projects you worked on and boosts your productivity, sure, it’s fine to take it with you. For example, a script that pastes by typing the characters instead by pressing a certain combination of keys. Or a script that mounts the shared files drive in VMware.

But taking code from your company projects is not okay. Maybe you implemented some fancy new middle-out compression algorithm in your company’s product, and you would like to take it with you, don’t. Maybe that gives your company the competitive edge.

If you decide to build a competing product or work for a competing company, I would recommend being 100% clean. Read your contract carefully, and make sure you are 100% in the clear. Make sure that if your company wants to sue you, they have nothing on you. And maybe consult a lawyer.

If you’re thinking about earning money with it while still being employed, think very hard about what you’re about to do. But otherwise, screw it, they don’t own what’s in your head, regardless of what bullshit they thought they could put into your contact

I wrote it for closed source software, I copy it for my closed source software.

My bosses do the same thing for their personal projects, lol.

As a Software Developer the most important method I have learned is to