1. you are competent! most dev are glorified plumbers we just stitch stuff together to make it work. Also 28 is young :) i remember feeling the same at 27, specifically i burned out and quit to do a world trip! At that time someone told me i was too old :) i was not and reflecting now, i would love to keep that state of mind till i die!
2. you are burned out / need a break maybe even a year, if the issue is $ then start by creating an upwork or fiver profile and see if you can get jobs then consider moving to a cheap place with internet and a weather you would like to work remote (bali / vietnam / brazil / estonia …)
3. to become a better dev i think reading would help, stepping back from code to focus on math / algo and the theory can help with developing an eye for the big picture. another way is like chess study your own games, look at code you produced and zoom into the library you ve used, look at its code hack it try to understand it and reach out if you don t understand something to those who built it. Finally you can also take a theme / something you re passionate about or something new (AI / VR ..) and learn about it, you will then progress like you did before, it always feels good
4. to network join meetups / dev conf / hackhatons etc.. i might be wrong since i don t dev anymore but i remember observing that when i would i could not socialize much, it was even worst when i studied Math, my hypothesis is that you tune your brain so much to logic and solving stuff that it s hard to meet people who don t want nor know how to talk about these obsessions/ but you ll be fine with your peers :)
5. finding your own direction / meaningful life, this one has been a tough one since the dawn of mankind up to existentialists. the usual way is to have a religion or to philosophy. In a more practical manner you can also create your own biz (go to a startup weekend for example) if you have no idea what you love or want to do, try to observe what pisses you off and build something to solve it (could be a library etc) check also ressources like indiehacker another way is to observe what you do naturally when not working, what s your passion a last trick is to imagine what you would do if uou won the lottery and just do that …
1. you are competent! most dev are glorified plumbers we just stitch stuff together to make it work. Also 28 is young :) i remember feeling the same at 27, specifically i burned out and quit to do a world trip! At that time someone told me i was too old :) i was not and reflecting now, i would love to keep that state of mind till i die!
2. you are burned out / need a break maybe even a year, if the issue is $ then start by creating an upwork or fiver profile and see if you can get jobs then consider moving to a cheap place with internet and a weather you would like to work remote (bali / vietnam / brazil / estonia …)
3. to become a better dev i think reading would help, stepping back from code to focus on math / algo and the theory can help with developing an eye for the big picture. another way is like chess study your own games, look at code you produced and zoom into the library you ve used, look at its code hack it try to understand it and reach out if you don t understand something to those who built it. Finally you can also take a theme / something you re passionate about or something new (AI / VR ..) and learn about it, you will then progress like you did before, it always feels good
4. to network join meetups / dev conf / hackhatons etc.. i might be wrong since i don t dev anymore but i remember observing that when i would i could not socialize much, it was even worst when i studied Math, my hypothesis is that you tune your brain so much to logic and solving stuff that it s hard to meet people who don t want nor know how to talk about these obsessions/ but you ll be fine with your peers :)
5. finding your own direction / meaningful life, this one has been a tough one since the dawn of mankind up to existentialists. the usual way is to have a religion or to philosophy. In a more practical manner you can also create your own biz (go to a startup weekend for example) if you have no idea what you love or want to do, try to observe what pisses you off and build something to solve it (could be a library etc) check also ressources like indiehacker another way is to observe what you do naturally when not working, what s your passion a last trick is to imagine what you would do if uou won the lottery and just do that …
good luck fellow human!