abhnv

I have 7 years of experience, mostly in JavaScript/Node.js, but I coasted for years and now feel unqualified for senior roles. I was recently fired from a senior developer job after 3 months.

I want to work on passion projects (e.g., indie games, open-source contributions, compilers, or graphics), but I need a stable income in the short term. I also dislike corporate culture—standups, bureaucracy, and endless Jira tickets—but I’m unsure if indie work will pay off.

Should I focus on sharpening my skills (React, system design, Golang, etc.) to land a solid developer job and fund my indie ambitions? Or should I take the leap and go all-in on building something solo, even with financial risk?

Would love to hear from others who’ve faced a similar situation. How did you balance stability and freedom? What worked for you?

PS : This was very long rant about my situation (I was fired yesterday). I have used ChatGPT to make it concise and to the point. I wish to work on things I find interesting, but I am forced to act like a professional developer, because money.

tldr; I execute my programs without dry running them in my head first, is that inefficient?

I have a habit of executing the entire program, after I implement a feature to check if it's working correctly.

I usually isolate my functions, in a small test environment, so the feedback loop is fast enough to highlight issues, if any.

But since I started working with a larger code bases, this approach feels inefficient. So my question is, would it be more efficient to read through the code and find out any typos or logical issues before actually executing the code?

I've completed 5 years working as a MEAN/MERN stack developer. Although since the last 3 years, my work mostly has been creating cli commands.

I used to like programming, but nowadays my work has boiled down to writing unit/integration tests or just fixing bugs. The last major feature that I implemented was 5 months ago. I don't want to work here anymore.

Should I work on solving LeetCode questions, and aim to get into FAANG companies. Or maybe try to go to Canada/USA/Ireland for a Masters in Comp Sci, because I don't have good grades in my undergrad. I've never faced any difficulty because of my low grades in undergrad yet, but will it be a problem when I go on to become a software architect in the future?

I have stopped learning new things, and working on personal projects because of Dota2. I'm trying to leave it behind, but its hard.

I feel very lost as to what to do right now.