Hi epimetheus2! There are probably going to be a few people here who say, "code in the morning, spend your time and mental energy on yourself before you spend it on your company". I agree with this, but I also want to point out a few things I've found for myself, since I'm coming from a similar background as you.

First, part of the thrill of coding when I was a kid was the discovering and learning new things. Even making my name flash on a screen was a really cool thing. At the time, coding felt like a mystic art that you had to master through hours of trial and error, and each thing you learned was another building block on your way to understanding.

Now that you're doing this for a job, you know how the sausage is made. You no longer are coding either elementary things (to learn whichever language), or even building things you find an interest in. You're using your skills for the purpose of making a company money (which hopefully pays you well enough to make up for the fact it's draining your own enthusiasm for this craft).

And that's probably one of the biggest things. You're taking this previously magical thing that you used to discover new and exciting ways to build [what you wanted] and using it for very mundane things, or for uses that you just have no passion about. Also, there are a million articles or Stack Overflow questions that tell you step by step what to do. You no longer have one old book from the library and 3 outdated Web sites that kind of talk about what you want to know. The excitement of discovery is lost since all of the answers are flashing on a bill board for you and everyone else.

I was feeling the same way as you from about 1 year ago until just 1 month ago. I also work as doing code (JVM stack and backend, as well). I also have about 3 projects of my own that I alternate between (1 backend, 1 frontend, and 1 that is both). About a year ago (Pandemic time) we laid off quite a few people, which meant all of my energy had to go into picking up a larger workload–effectively killing my motivation and passion for my projects.

Taking a year long break from my passion and projects was a very good thing. You shouldn't have to feel that you "need" to code for joy. That'd just kill the joy. Instead, find something that brings back that feeling of newness and magical curiosity that coding did when you were a child. Something that nobody is telling you what to do, or how to use your abilities.

Take up painting, photography, bike riding, wood crafting, a Raspberry Pi or other hardware (although, let's be honest, there are probably a lot of us who just buy them and leave them in a drawer :)). Even learning how to tend a flower garden would be something that you can pour energy into and feel invigorated when you get the results.

In time, your thirst for creating your own thing with code will come back (it did for me, anyway). And in the mean time, you can feel reinvigorated seeing the benefits of your work come to fruition, and have new knowledge that you can share with other people, or just enjoy thinking about as you go about your day problem solving how to solve your next curiosity.

Good luck! Life should be fun. You don't need to be the "coding as a hobby" person all the time! Feel free to jump around and only enjoy the things that bring you joy when they do that for you :)