[citeguised]

I work in Front-End and have always had side-projects with coding involved (Games, Websites, CLI-Tools).

Some of my career's and company's circumstances (no senior front-end-devs for reviewing and mentoring around, mostly work on classic websites/web-shops) make it necessary. It's the only way to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date and to improve beyond what I do at work.

Coding and building is fun to me, so I was ok with this. After getting kids though, my available home-coding-time shrunk to almost zero.

My employer does allow and pay for conferences/workshops, but there's nothing as good for learning as a real project with more senior team-members, I guess.

I really don't want to leave after 8 years of building reputation and seniority, and start from scratch elsewhere, in a big unknown.

How do others cope with that?

[souprock]

Well, same here on the kids. I wrote /bin/ps for Linux and maintained the procps package for about a decade. I also did significant work on Tux Paint and a little Linux kernel work. I managed just fine with 3 tiny kids and a job, and later with 5 small kids and no job. Adding back a job, I hit my limit. This is one way that Open Source projects die.

Since then, the situation has only gotten more extreme. My family size goes to 11, and yes that is one louder than 10. Soon I'll have a dozen, all homeschooled.

I got one kid interested in following in my footsteps, so sometimes I get to have fun teaching him. Mostly, there just isn't time for anything extra. One factor that helps is that I'm in a different part of the industry. You're in "Front-End", which might mean you need to learn a new javascript framework every year. I mostly write in C, for which the last update was 8 years ago and the last significant update was 20 years ago. When I'm not doing C, I'm doing a wide variety of different kinds of assembly language. That changes, but one is expected to constantly refer to the manual. So really I've gone a quarter century with no significant change. I am pondering the value of learning rust, but I certainly don't have to scramble each year to learn the hot new thing.