It's quite depressing to watch others progress beyond the menial tasks whilst i seem to be in stasis.

i read for about an hour every morning. reddit, hacker news, newsletters. Gives you great exposure to everything that's out there and what's changing. I highly recommend just picking simple function you need to write and work on that in the mornings. work on building isolated, modular code. I tend to write more functional / interface bases code than OO these days. Easier to reason about and maintain.