I was stuck in a seemingless treadmill where I was looking after my children, going to work, coming home and being utterly exhasted.
I started going into autopilot at work and stopped inovating and spent more and more time organising things and less time coding.
I realised that if I didn't change I would end up de-skilling myself and end up in Management or worse.
Don't get me wrong about Management, I'm sure it's deeply rewarding if it's your calling but for me it felt a bit soleless so I had to do something.
I now have a nice balance of family time as well as spend at least 5 hours a day coding professionally and around 5 hours a week hacking on personal or open source endeavours
So what changed?
I made things uncomfortable for myself.
I started running a few times a week - suprisingly, this eats into more of my precious time but seems to make me less mentally tired, less grumpy with the kids and more able to concentrate when coding.
I made sure I did at least 30 minutes of personal coding an evening to skill up - starting with katas then moving onto personaly projects, open source contributions or groking new tech. Once that is done I'm free to relax with my partner, eat, watch tv, drink wine, etc
I quit my permanent Senior Development role and started contracting, this resulted in less meetings and more pure coding tasks.
I always take the opportunities that allow me to learn new things.
During the day I don't procrastinate (browsing the web, e.g. hacker news is limited for me) - I work hard on my programming tasks but not silly hard, e.g. I have regular breaks, lunch, etc.
As a good starter for ten, if you don't mind targeting Windows for your server then it's hard to beat the Microsoft development stack.
Start by downloading the free version of Visual Studio Express.
For the server: C#/ ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET Web API
For the client: JavaScript / HTML / CSS
Pick a JavaScript framework like Angular/KnockOut, JQuery and make it pretty and responsive for mobile with something like Bootstrap or Zurb.
For hosting your project, take a look at Windows Azure. You get a free hosted web site to play around with that can be automatically deployed from your source code stored on your github/bitbucket account.
Even if you're no fan of Microsoft, I'd recommend spending the time to look at the technology as they've invested heavily in it and it is rather good and developer friendly.
As a .net dev by trade, I seriously don't recommend going with .net for starting with web dev. For every microsoft option, theres 15 open source options with better community support that is easier to get started with.
I started going into autopilot at work and stopped inovating and spent more and more time organising things and less time coding.
I realised that if I didn't change I would end up de-skilling myself and end up in Management or worse.
Don't get me wrong about Management, I'm sure it's deeply rewarding if it's your calling but for me it felt a bit soleless so I had to do something.
I now have a nice balance of family time as well as spend at least 5 hours a day coding professionally and around 5 hours a week hacking on personal or open source endeavours
So what changed?
I made things uncomfortable for myself.
I started running a few times a week - suprisingly, this eats into more of my precious time but seems to make me less mentally tired, less grumpy with the kids and more able to concentrate when coding.
I made sure I did at least 30 minutes of personal coding an evening to skill up - starting with katas then moving onto personaly projects, open source contributions or groking new tech. Once that is done I'm free to relax with my partner, eat, watch tv, drink wine, etc
I quit my permanent Senior Development role and started contracting, this resulted in less meetings and more pure coding tasks.
I always take the opportunities that allow me to learn new things.
During the day I don't procrastinate (browsing the web, e.g. hacker news is limited for me) - I work hard on my programming tasks but not silly hard, e.g. I have regular breaks, lunch, etc.