Kick Off Having worked as a Software Developer for nearly twenty years, it recently occurred to me that I have been living off the same skillset for at least the last fifteen. At no point have I even needed to learn new skills - instead I've been maturing my existing ones gradually. All the learning I have done in that time has been dedicated to the applications I work on and the businesses that uses them. When I started out I actually did a lot of learning at home. My evenings were clear from 6pm onwards so I would have time to install databases, experiment with functionality and techniques, and even try out other technologies. This accelerated my development substantially, just as much as all the on-the-job training I was doing at work at the time. Then, a familiar story, involving a woman and (later) some children and all the other tedious distractions of adult life (which could be the elixir that turns interesting people boring) . Plus I can't ignore my general decreas