Yes, what he said. I would only add Time management as a major component. Hardware is the easy part. Starting at a specific time, taking an actual lunch break, and quitting at a designated time, is the hardest part for me. Act just like you are used to time wise. Start working when you normally do, stop working when you usually do. It is very easy to think of 5:00 as just a number on the clock but putting in 14 hour days can sneak up on you and will burn you out. I know this as a fact. I also know you can recover from burn out (most folks do) but it's not fun. Other than that and the suggestions above you really should enjoy the extra time you have and you will find you can have a productive day and 5 meetings without missing a beat! It only takes a couple of min. to set up a teams meeting and if you have an agenda for them they are usually very productive.

20 years with GKG.Net, no complaints. People to talk to out of College Station Texas.

Ah, a teacher

This was the comment from one of the folks responding to your question. "The degree shows that you can take a hard task and stick with it for several years." As a person who does not have a degree and one who hires programmers this is the rule that works for my staff. 1. If you have a PHD you are not eligible ( you have too many years of people who can't work in this field "Teachers" telling you your great ) 2. If you can do the work and you are good at it you are in. ( meaning if you show that you program because you get a buzz out of it, that is what I'm looking for ) 3. A degree? It has always been if you can do the work then you can have the job. 4. HR departments are now full of people who have a degree and they think it matters but who would want to work for a company that let's those people make important decisions. 5. Finally - If you think you are the kind of person who can take a hard task and work at it for years then you need to find a different kind of work. Yes certainly you will have to work at programming very hard just to keep up but think about it. If you are just here for the 8 to 5 it will drain your life away.

Design (architect) from the top down, then implement from the bottom up. This statement should be refactored a bit. Try "After the intended Architect understands the strengths and weaknesses and capabilities of the proposed technology stack as fully as possible", architect from the top down, Then implement from the bottom up and refactor the entire stack as soon as the "Real" tech stack is better understood. Then race to understand what new direction the industry is heading this month and refactor yet again to be ready for it. Rinse and repeat.

I work with dotnet 5 every day and I cannot say that any of the claims here are actually factual. I run core 3.1 ( which is NOT exactly the same as dotnet 5 ) on a Raspberry PI with full UI. (UWP). I Now run dotnet 5 as a portable web site ( runs on everything I've tried so far, with no real complications ). As for size of the executable folder. Try this..... Just create a demo app using full framework ( web forms ) then create the demo Blazor app, now do a comparison using windows explorer-Properties. Be aware if you used the ".ALL" nuget package in your conversion ( Huge legacy, Full Framework library ) and then select the option that automatically loads the whole Kestral web server into the runtime folder when you deploy you will get a lot of things you really don't need. Actually the whole paradigm has changed.

My favorite programming language is English. Or did I miss not only the joke but the message? Actually I'm just a carpenter and I have many hammers. ( except that stupid language Cobol. I saw an article that says it becoming popular again,,,,, sure it is) Actually I laughed at most of the responses posted on this one. When did programmers develop such a great sense of humor?

I always just do what I have to, to get by...... Then I notice that there is just one more thing that I could do to make the outcome soooooo much better..... and then I do just that one thing. and on and on and then I am scrambling to get it all shinny to meet the deliverable schedule. As far as BS. Hummmmm, does seem to be a lot more middle management involved now. That is good and bad. Mostly bad it seems. Scrum, kind of necessary with the new gen of programmers, not so much with the silverbacks. Got to go now, I just noticed a bit of code that needs just one more pass to make it soooo much better.

Spoken like one who is "Truly" outside the loop. I love the "Oh, we're dumping ReactJS. We've rewritten it completely with only "Small" breaking changes. YEAH, let's go AngularJS the "More versions than fleas on a baboon" language. Pick one you will like. uh, no that one is now obsolete. Besides, browsers are soooooo stable across platforms they should be declared a standard..... Actually there are so many standards you can't keep up with them. You are probably right.... Having a true write once and just change the IO's to match the op system language and platform is probably a pipe dream.... Oh, wait... I already have it working using ASP.NET Core....... I know, I know,,,, Raspberry pi is really not a computer......... Actually it is, and is very stable if you use a 2 amp dongle. So C# and a PI talking to an MVC app running in the cloud is a lot of fun...... But MS is sooo confused. Yes, they are probably just stupid to make almost all of their releases of software backwards compatible which protects everyone's investments in IP. I know being open source is so stupid and letting the user community submit enhancements is way dumb..... But they plod along just the same.....