| I have 10 kids, soon to be 11, and I homeschool. So... that's how open source projects go to die, and the major reason why I no longer maintain procps. This was painful, but family comes first. The concept of "quality time" is broken. You can't squeeze life into a few spare moments here and there, and you mostly can't schedule it. You have to live it, being there for the skinned knees that can happen at any moment. There is no substitute for being available. Side projects are limited to things that can be done with kids. That changes as they grow. Studying new technology is something I can do at work. I help invent it actually, and I dig into a wide variety of things, so that's fine. Maybe it is different for web developers; ouch if that is the case. I do low-level stuff. A big difference is that I don't live or work in a "proper" city and haven't since I got married. I tend to live in the sort of place that is borderline big enough for a commercial airport, with perhaps 33,000 to 100,000 people at a density that is well below anything in the Bay Area. This lets me afford to live near work, and it means that there is little traffic. By car, my worst 1-way commute was 15 minutes. It's now about 3 minutes. Compared to your hour-long commute, that 3 minutes is pretty much a rounding error. It's like I get an extra 10 hours of life per week. You have at most 4 hours for family on weekdays. Imagine if you had 6 hours instead. I get that big-city life has more entertainment, but you don't seem to have time to take advantage of it. |