It’s actually pretty neat. I constantly suffer from impostor syndrome, so I always have keep learning to keep up the facade.

It doesn’t matter. Still get paid 💁🏼‍♀️

I literally can't. Life would get too boring not learning new stuff.

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

By constantly fucking around with things that interest me. If a topic fascinates me i will either lool for shit around youtube, read proper documentacion or buy specialized books for it.

Most recently it has been compiler design. I wanna write my own language, for testing and learning more than anything.

I dunno, it keeps shit fun and interesting. Now, much of that shit ain't applied to what I do in web. But it does help to keep the mind fresh as well as giving me the chance to eventually invent my own language. Write a large system with it, use it at the institution and have them pay me obscene ammounts of money to maintain it.

It will be like VB6 or VbScript, but with {}s, immutable values by default and no looping, cuz I am evil AF

Don't get stuck maintaining legacy stuff.

If you move to new, preferably greenfield dev every so often then you'll naturally keep with the times (at least if you're working in a vaguely decent team.) If you stick in one place too long and get stuck maintaining legacy crap, then that will be your focus, and that will be where your knowledge sticks.

Have a curious mind. Yes, the kind that allegedly killed the cat.

When your natural instinct is to spend every idle moment learning something new, to plateau is not likely.

Manic episodes make me productive while never ending immense guilt make me constantly learn new things because I feel absolutely worthless when I don’t.

I wish all the money I have could fix this but it cannot.

Curiosity
I try to read about stuff that is related to what I am doing. Trying to learn about design patterns. The most recent example being learning about the Actor Model when I worked on Orleans Grains in a project at my company. That lead to learning about erlang and akka.
These things excite me. Makes me think about every problem I have ever solved. Drives me to think from a multitude of perspectives in the future.

Experiment with new stuff, look into the deeper aspects of what I'm doing etc.

Consistently evaluating myself. Assessing where and what I lack and writing goals to work on. Not being comfortable for so long. Doing interviews help in the skill assessment.

What even is that?

Personal projects that try to incorporate some new tech (or at least new to me)

By experimenting. By trying to integrate different tech and seeing how things work out.
If something doesn’t work out, you know the problems, if something does work out you have one more way of solving some problems.
(Also by freelancing, adding these successful experimentations into a shippable product and adding it to yoir portfolio)