Experienced Devs

Context, I am a full time professional developer with about 8 years of job experience.

I generally do not get motivated to study during my off hours. I tend to do what I want to do. I (used to) browse r/programming and every now and then an article would catch my eye. This sounds dorky as hell but sometimes I read technical documentation to help me fall asleep (can be very hot or miss though).

The few side projects I have carried to what I'd call completion have been related to things I was interested in apart from programming that I wanted to pursue. Without fail, everytime I look for inspirational ideas of things to make I have lost interest immediately. Recently I played through Breath of the Wild and was annoyed by all the armor trackers online so I made a super bare bones one I wanted to use. I learned some frontend stuff doing it. A year ago I built an irrigation controller for my yard. (This was a waste of money and effort though and I can't say I enjoyed the process but I did still learn from it lol.)

The moral of the story is have your eyes open to gaps in your everyday life. Ask yourself "could I make that?" Give it a go and see. Give it a good weekend's worth of effort and see what you get. Usually I can dedicate about 2 days to something before losing interest so I try to keep it as minimal as possible. Start small. Super small. The smaller the better. Willingly accept that it will be shitty. In fact, try to make it shitty so you don't get discouraged by it not being perfect. I get hung up a lot on how to make things perfect from the start. Intentionally making it imperfect helps me get over that.