not_a_test_user

You no longer can say that it's hard to emigrate to the USA: you just need to enlist, give up your freedom and possibly your morals! Grrreat deal.

I'm starting to realize that what I like about web development is creating visual experiences. Sadly, that job, at least around here, seems to be limited to web agencies with all the crazy deadlines and crazy hours that implies (I know because my last job was in an agency).

So, here I am, making admin panels and customizable charts. I have learned a lot though (ElasticSearch, Angular, etc), even if it's not fun stuff.

Why? I went from having very limited free time due to having a commute to having at least 3 - 5 hours every day after work. Even more if I woke up earlier.

I'm interested in learning how to use those hours that I never had before because I have been marathoning Netflix series and I'm not so sure that's good for me in the long run.

I'll take that into account, but right now I'm more interested in improving my free time. Working from home is perfect right now. :)

Best case scenario: Retired, living in the beach or a mountain somewhere.

Worst case scenario and much more probable: Too old to continue working in the ageist tech industry and too old to start again, I'll be working a low-wage job trying to make ends meet.

It really needs some kind of demo or video, there's no way I'm going to log in just to see what it does considering the amount of permissions it requests.

I'm currently working in web agency so speed > anything else.

The amount of technical debt we have shipped dwarfs the GPD of a small country.

I know HTML/(S)CSS like the back of my hand. I know enough JS for most use cases and I'm starting to explore React and other frameworks to expand my knowledge. In the backend side of things I can code in PHP without any problem and I have hacked a bit in Ruby and Python, currently trying to expand what I know in Ruby in my free time.

The local market sucks so I'm unable to escape from my agency job. I feel trapped making disposable marketing websites that will disappear in a month or two. I have applied to remote jobs but most don't want someone that is not from the US.

I have no idea what to do. I feel like my current job is killing my drive for web development even though I love it.

Sorry for venting here.

Photo app like an image gallery or something like Instagram that applies filters to images?

When you say app do you mean a web page/app or a phone app?

We use mostly PHP at work but lately I have been using my free time to learning Ruby because most good job offers around here ask for Rails knowledge.

I'm not saying there are no PHP job offers, there are, but they are mostly for maintaining old codebases that have none of the good features that modern PHP has. Or they are for web agency jobs that consist of mass producing cookie cutter web sites.

I think Laravel 5 looks very interesting but I feel I can't afford to explore it because I need to learn Ruby if I want a better job.