Programming is boring after five years of CRUD/"business"/"enterprise" apps. Unfortunately they make up the majority of the jobs out there but making the effort to get a more interesting job is worth it.
I know my tools very well, keep up to date with trends, and I'm constantly grateful at how lucky I've been. I'm a very mediocre developer, but I'm fantastically well paid for a job that really isn't very difficult.
FWIW - I use Symfony (especially the form bundle), Behat, and nginx. At some point, I want to start building Angular front ends as well. I try to be Agile by delivering early and often.
That's why you do personal project.
For the baker it could be baking a complicated recipe.
For the programmer it's learning something new and solving new problems... well, for the programmer it's also baking a complicated recipe.