It's great learning new things. It's great building new concepts and things.. I give all the respect to those who work on and build all the various open source products that are widely used across the world.
But in my world, projects need to get done.. I'd love to spend a month or two or three figuring out the the deep core knowledge of a framework or software package, but there are only so many hours in a day and days in a week.
And I'm not 25 years old anymore either when 100 hours a week was a good week and then I'd figure other stuff out on my own by working on my or other people's side projects.
while I continue to keep up to date and learn new things, those days of working all night and then working on my own side projects just for fun are sort of in the past for me.
I might work long hours to finish a project, but digging deep down into Linux or Windows or one of the millions of open source projects out there isn't an everyday occurrence anymore. I just don't have the time or desire to do that anymore.
Learning new things is one thing, figuring out how something works is one thing, but learning practically every new open source and commercial product that comes out every week just isn't gonna do it for me anymore.
It takes a lot of effort, brains, time, emotion, and stress when you are designing, researching, building, developing,
testing, deploying, mantaining, and training new systems or reengineered systems that the idea of not only learning but figuring out to the bits and bytes on almost every new open source project that comes out has long lost it's luster for me and many people.
Maybe if i maintained a system where i played solitaire all day more than anything else, then i guess I'd have the energy to work on side projects, dig deep down into every open source that comes out.
But that isn't my world. I know people in IT that are in that world and i guess it's good for them, but i like being busy and I also like doing things outside of the computer world.
I learned a long time ago about balance and life.
Working 100+ hours a week was nice, but if you worked for one of the millions of dot com companies that crumbled, it wasn't exactly worth it in the end.
Yeah tons of things were learned about technology, programming, design, computers, and business. And I wouldn't replace that for the world, but on that same note, when a stock is worth less than the paper it is on, those long hard hours spent staring at a computer, figuring out how to get things working, how not to do things, and so on and basically having no social life or family life or working all the holidays and in the end having really nothing to show for it but....well i guess experience.
But missing out on most of my twenties I can't say was well worth it. The money would have been good if I worked at microsoft or an amazon and so on where stocks made people millionaires, but not for a crumbled dot com companies.
I like what I do, but i've learned to balance my life....
If I were in my twenties maybe I'd put all the time in to learn every bit and byte of most open source material, but at the present time, i will learn how it works, figure out how to use it within what I'm doing, get it to work, and move on.