Building anything real is a lot of work. The real question is: what kind of work do you want to be doing?
I don't really program for fun anymore, but when I did, I always worked on completely personal things I could build without relying on monolithic frameworks. In practice this usually meant command-line or terminal-based apps, e.g. text editors.
I didn't build anything the world hadn't seen some version of before, but the crucial difference between these projects and something like e.g. a Reddit clone is that most of the challenges I set for myself were pure problem-solving. I never had the patience for projects that had me constantly Googling for APIs and ___domain-specific hacks and so on, for a similar reason to what I'm picking up from you: it all seems arbitrary and brittle and subject to change, and it's not at all fun. It's drudgery. It feels like running on a treadmill, except you're still just sitting on your ass getting older.
It's rewarding to solve complex problems elegantly, and the most challenging pure implementation work I've done has been on my own time. I like to think I learned a lot, in "pure" topics as well as design at complexity scales that a lot of developers never see, and my career to date seems to suggest that I wasn't wasting my time.
Sometimes I don't give this advice, because I don't know how well it would work for somebody who's trying to bootstrap a career from zero professional experience, but it sounds like that isn't the case for you. Unless you think there is some framework or technology that will give you a clear advantage applying for jobs you want, I think you should leave the drudgery at work and spend your time enriching yourself with interesting problems. Pick something you think is interesting and challenging, and learn what you need to learn to make it happen.
I don't really program for fun anymore, but when I did, I always worked on completely personal things I could build without relying on monolithic frameworks. In practice this usually meant command-line or terminal-based apps, e.g. text editors.
I didn't build anything the world hadn't seen some version of before, but the crucial difference between these projects and something like e.g. a Reddit clone is that most of the challenges I set for myself were pure problem-solving. I never had the patience for projects that had me constantly Googling for APIs and ___domain-specific hacks and so on, for a similar reason to what I'm picking up from you: it all seems arbitrary and brittle and subject to change, and it's not at all fun. It's drudgery. It feels like running on a treadmill, except you're still just sitting on your ass getting older.
It's rewarding to solve complex problems elegantly, and the most challenging pure implementation work I've done has been on my own time. I like to think I learned a lot, in "pure" topics as well as design at complexity scales that a lot of developers never see, and my career to date seems to suggest that I wasn't wasting my time.
Sometimes I don't give this advice, because I don't know how well it would work for somebody who's trying to bootstrap a career from zero professional experience, but it sounds like that isn't the case for you. Unless you think there is some framework or technology that will give you a clear advantage applying for jobs you want, I think you should leave the drudgery at work and spend your time enriching yourself with interesting problems. Pick something you think is interesting and challenging, and learn what you need to learn to make it happen.