I feel like my development skills are plateauing, and I don't know what to do. It makes sense though, I am hired as a freelancer for the skills I already have, not my potential for learning on the job.
One of the things I miss the most from my in-person job is the mentorship from senior developers. I miss being able to ask a quick question, or have them code review my work. Without this guidance, I often feel lonely since it's just me and the internet vs the problem.
My current method to continue learning is to read blogs, read weekly newsletters, and work through online courses. The challenge here is that it's still entirely up to me to interpret and adapt the lessons into my own work. I don't have anyone to discuss the learning points with and verify that I understand the lesson correctly.
Do you have any advice on how I can find mentorship as a solo, remote freelancer?
* Doing a small side-project that you follow through on. Just doing a little bit each day. I've done PHP (Laravel / Symfony) and JavaScript (jQuery, now mostly Vue.js) for most of my "career". Now I'm doing side-projects in Python (I try to use Flask or Django). Actually, I'm just writing up an article on how I want to focus on "boring" tech, because I don't want to learn a new technology on the side that gets obsolete 2 years later (I'm looking at you, AngularJS 1 & bower & grunt & gulp).
* Get on board with a team where many of them are senior developers. I've been in projects where I was silo-ed off and worked on a specific feature - Boost Level 4 / 10 (because I get to dig deeper into specific areas, if I so choose). In projects where I was the most senior developer because the company focused on only hiring junior developers and doing scrum / agile - Boost Level 3 / 10 (we were discussing so much, so actual development time was little). Team of senior developers each with their specific skill set working on an MVP deliverable within 2 months and you only know 60% of the technologies used - Boost Level 8 / 10.