Okay, I have looked for a solution to my specific problem but have only found solutions for working on personal projects at work or on sick days - which is not lining up with my problem.
I'm a junior developer, recently finished school about a year ago. I am now working full time as a junior developer at a small company. This is my second FT dev job after college. Side note: Prior to working here, I worked at a previous company that was not a good fit at all (i.e. they'd send me emails at 7pm on a Friday night and ask me to get the job done by Sunday night which I was not happy with) and management let me go.
During the last couple years, I have spent a great amount of time developing a personal portfolio - building websites, features, and open-source libraries (gems) for learning purposes and to use it as a discussion point in CV and at interviews. This has quite entirely worked to my advantage as it has strengthened my skills and gives me something to talk about in my CVs and interviews.
Since starting work here, I have (on my own time!) been actively developing projects outside of work to keep my skills up in that language and framework (Ruby and Ruby on Rails). My company uses an entirely different framework and language (Qt and C++). Moreover, my personal projects are in regards to personal interests like recipes, color schemes, the Bible, skateboarding, learning how to use Vim etc. All of my git repos are public and I only work on these projects after working hours are over (i.e. when I'm at home and not working).
At the company where I wasn't a good fit, they would always inquire as to what I did last night or over the weekend. And of course, since I believe honesty is the best policy, I would tell them that I worked on my personal projects because they said when I first started working there that it would be entirely okay to keep developing personal projects on my own time. I soon found out that they didn't like that at all and was basically told to keep my mouth shut. And they'd continue to ask me what I did over the weekend or the night before...which I just started having to lie or keep my responses vague. In a nut shell, the senior devs gave me the impression that personal projects on my own time was definitely not okay.
However, I am at an entirely new company and I'm still continuing to strengthen my skills with my personal projects outside of work. My question is, is it okay to continue to develop personal projects outside of work? I only wish to keep my skills in this one framework up because (a) I've been working on personal projects in this framework/language for 3.5 years now and (b) I really like to program in my spare time
EDIT: Nobody at my current company asks about my personal life and of course I'm not just going to tell others that I've been programming outside of work because I feel that that's not the right thing to do.