[southbaybob]

The truth is that you can learn everything covered by the new buzz words out there. However, unless you have a real use case for them or serious about finding ways to use them. You will just be wasting your time. Might as well spend more time with family and just enjoy life.

You can go ahead and learn something new. However, you need to set your expectations right. Unless you are a genius (which you may be. i just have never met you or know anything about you), the new language for you will just be a hobby. Making a career out of a hobby and compete with others who have being doing it for a while is hard unless you are dedicated. Or it could be that you just want to learn it and have fun. No one knows yourself better than other people. So you will know what your realistic expectations are and whether you are okay with it.

That being said, my approach would actually not be trying to start with picking a new language. Each language is good at certain contexts. For example, you use node if you want to do long polling because it's unreasonably low memory usage per connection. Each nosql database has its pros and cons towards what you are trying to do.

My advice will be try to build something and pick languages and backends based on what you are trying to build. You already have 2 side projects. Maybe start with a mobile project this time? Try to look into your day to day life and see if there some little and fun tasks you can solve using new technologies? I think you will learn in a much more relevant context this way.