I've been consulting about 25 hours a week for the last couple years. Sometimes a little more (there was a month where I was doing north of 80 hours a week--and it was time-and-a-half overtime-billable, which is something I don't expect to ever see again), sometimes a lot less when business is light.

It's probably kept me from leaving tech entirely. I was in a weird middle-ground spot in my career where I had pretty much topped out on what I was going to be able to accomplish as a purely technical developer at companies of the size I enjoy working at, but at the same time I was basically too young (and still look very young) to be in a managerial role over senior developers. So consulting has been a great outlet where I've kept technically very sharp but been able to generate the social credibility to work with management on a peer level rather than as an employee-employer level.

I'm idly thinking about going back to FT (but not aggressively, I don't need to) for the consistency, but at the same time, I'm always looking for more gigs either in application development, as I'm pretty comfortable across many languages and frameworks, or in devops/infrastructure consulting, because I build cloud systems that are fault-tolerant and secure. (Looking to boost your team? Email's in my profile.)