[twelve40]

Have to do side projects. In my past life, I was getting sucked into becoming a very conservative tech stack lifer at a huge, all-encompassing company. Most people that surrounded me, even the good, hard-working ones, were 9-5 and expressed surprise and hostility to learning anything outside of the company bubble. Then one day a new, more active guy joined our team and whipped up a complete REST-based service in a week. My mind=blown. I quit for the startups, and moved on to using dozens of different stacks since and never looked back. The best, most educating moments typically happened outside of work, when you combine the patterns and observations from work with a different stack or a smart outsider friend who chimes in on your daily struggles from a surprising different angle.

Another enlightening moment for me was when I was working on a hobby machine learning project, and shared my design concerns with a brilliant but very much non-ML coworker, and all of a sudden that coworker laid out the whole design in a pretty convincing detail, like he's been doing this work for years. After the initial shock from his seemingly birth-given ML skills, I noticed that he simply takes a lot of good online classes and goes through all the top ML material on the web in his spare time, even though it was irrelevant to his tech focus at the time. Well guess what, two years later he got promoted and he's making that sweet data science money, and guess where he would have been if he only focused on his old day-to-day instead.