Web development has become insane indeed. At work, I tell myself, technologies change and we need to adopt or we will be left behind. But it is not as joyful a

Web development has become insane indeed. At work, I tell myself, technologies change and we need to adopt or we will be left behind. But it is not as joyful as it used to be. For personal projects, I have been using Laravel, I run it on my local machine using Laravel Valet. I got a tiny CRM, chores manager, and various other little one off tools. Laravel is today's MS Access. In early 2000s, I built various applications for small businesses using MS Access. But my skills in PHP/Laravel leads to web development jobs. Which means everything that you have mentioned. So I am slowly exploring new options. Earlier I was playing with Python and Data Science. Jupyter Notebooks are fairly portable, and let you visualize data in fun ways. And I figured Laravel/Nodejs > Django > Data Engineer > Data Science should be easy. But it wasn't as enjoyable. I like building tools. Now I am exploring desktop application development. I looked at Electronjs but that reminded me too much of work. I have started playing with Swift/MacOS/Desktop app development. Apple's development ecosystem using Swift seems great. So far no real issue though I am not doing anything advanced. What I like about it is that I can actually build apps that I can share with my friends without having them install a bunch of dependencies on their machines. The debuggers are awesome. Also I am exploring artistic apps like AR with sound effects + visualizations. You are closer to hardware and can do some pretty cool things. I am not sure how the job market for Swift macOS development is but my goal is to find some sane challenging but not overwhelming (CBNO) programming opportunities.