I don't know about the nature of your side projects. Have you done any in challenging computer science fields like computer vision, speech recognition or machin

I don't know about the nature of your side projects. Have you done any in challenging computer science fields like computer vision, speech recognition or machine learning, or anything electronics related? The fun thing about them is that there are no dearth of problems to solve, and if you really want to build an intuition in them to come up with new techniques, you have to brush up on or learn from scratch multiple math fields like statistics, linear algebra and calculus. For an autodidact like me, it's like a kid in a toy shop. I felt the way you did some years ago. I was good at stringing up frameworks together in multiple languages and writing glue code to make some CRUD apps. It made me complacent that I was "good" at this and then I got "bored". Venturing out of my mental comfort zones to tougher fields has proven to be a great way to avoid that boredom. Haven't got bored in past 5 years!