Can you say a bit more about your experience? My profile has my email too if you prefer non-public communication. Genuinely interested in your journey.

A little but I wouldn't want to dox myself. Essentially I'd been doing some related stuff as a byline in my previous career as well as some enthusiast stuff and private freelancing. I cashed out and did some dedicated study to fill in some gaps and then started jobhunting. Overall transition took 1 1/2 years, plus a further 8 to get into my current specialty and pass income parity with previous career

8=months !

What do you do when you don't have that itch?

You probably won't be successful. As the landscape currently is, and has been for quite a while, you have to really enjoy doing it to the point where you self educate quite a bit. If you aren't willing to do that you will fall behind your peers.

It's similar to playing the guitar. The people who are good at it don't just take a guitar class and call it a day, they spend hours working to improve their playing, learn a bunch of songs, learn to play them perfectly from beginning to end, and learn to write their own songs. That's what it takes to be a successful guitar player. Coding is similar.

To be honest, if you don't have some external driver meaningful to you then it can be pretty hard to absorb the knowledge

Are you employed as an SWE? Web dev?

Platform engineering lead