zlacker

If you are worried about your career prospects built a portifolio with what you want to work in the future. If your mental state with the project doesn't allow you to work in arcane bugs full-time, reserve some time for personal learning and portifolio building, but keep working full-time.

A good personal open source project is worth more when interviewing than anything else really. Can't fake that in an interview.

>>Daniel+(OP)
I have been slowly doing this but in my experience, I have never had anyone care about my open source projects and the real problem is not raw coding skill, its being able to work in a large team and follow all modern processes that you'd pickup in modern teams. I am trying to learn and adopt these processes on my team (my coworker is onboard) but its a slog.

For example we compile locally, then manually move the compiled code over to the server instead of using something like docker. Part of this is the restrictions we have over our environment, part of this is inertia.

Fortunately I haven't given up trying to move to that paradigm but sometimes I actually dont want to be on a modern team. Its like I have plateaued to a comfortable state that I know wont always be there but I wish it did. I hope what I am explaining makes sense.