I have been playing guitar for twenty years. I am not bad. I learned plenty in those two decades. I can play songs. I know my chords. My power chords are tight. I have decent timing and I can hold my own in most situations.
The catch is that I spent those twenty years playing metal and hardcore. Downtuned riffs. Chugging palm mutes. The occasional breakdown where everyone in the room loses their minds. I got very good at a very specific type of guitar playing. The kind where subtlety goes to die and the only dynamic is loud versus louder.
I built a small app called Regex Battle. It lives at https://regexbattle.com and it turns regular expressions into a head to head game. You get a prompt, a timer starts, and your goal is to write a regex that meets the challenge before the clock hits zero. You can play against another person or against a bot if you want to practice solo.
Regex Battle is a PvP regular expression battle game with a bot and PvP mode. Each round gives you an objective and a set of example strings. Your job is to write a pattern that matches what it should and rejects what it should not. When you submit, the app checks your regex against the round tests and shows the result. Fast and correct beats slow and almost. Simple as that.
I learned early that a day job will keep you busy, but it will not always stretch you. If you want to move forward, you have to put in reps outside the clock. Not forever, not at the cost of your life, but long enough and often enough to build range.
I started in an agency. Fast pace, many clients, constant context switching. I worked late nights and some weekends because I wanted to get better. That is not a long term lifestyle and I do not recommend burning yourself out, but those seasons taught me how to ship, how to debug under pressure, and how to own the result. They also taught me to set better boundaries later. You can hold both truths: growth often requires extra effort, and health requires rest.