Great read. I can really relate. Like you, when I started in the industry, I obsessed my way into being a relevant developer. I felt that it was an investment that would pay off. In a lot of ways it has. What I didn't know is the cost of staying relevant. It's hard to know what is really happening and what is hype. Cloud native, Microservices, Micro-frontends, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Event Streaming, Functional Programming, CICD...it never stops. Unfortunately the business doesn't care until they realize all of their apps are obsolete. So, not only do we have to convince ourselves that we need to stay up on things, we have to convince our bosses. It's not an easy way to make a living for sure.