35 karma · joined May 4, 2012
I personally use Laravel for my side projects and but have been a long time asp.net user at work where working with multiple teams on large projects is more of a concern.
The Ruby on rails channel on YouTube has a playlist explaining all the new components of rails 8 called rails 8 unpacked. Things like solid queue/cache and propshaft.
Alternatively you can run everything in docker using Laravel sail and not worry about installing anything on your system.
All the other tooling and packages like breeze are just conveniences that give you additional capabilities
Do the minimal amount of what you need to do at work to get your job done and work on a side hustle that gets you excited at night. Limit it to 2 or 3 hours per day but stay consistent. At the same time study the job market and identify opportunities that would work for you then learn the technologies and skills required for those positions and add that as skills on your resume.
Life is too short to not be excited about what you are doing every morning you wake up. But you also have to have an action plan for the future to get out of the status quo.
Also build a project with the the latest ms stack, something like an e-commerce site with microservices and set yourself up as a business and put on your resume that the last two years you were the CTO of your own business developing e-commerce solutions for clients to fill your employment gap
Good luck