I think you're not being ambitious enough in your side projects.
I'm like you. I write fairly vanilla production code, then I go home and work on alien technology. And I used to have the same problem as you: I'd get sidetracked and sidetracked, and somehow I went from writing a fart app to reading about type theory.
So I started skipping the fart app part, and started learning some more abstract theory. The nice thing abstract theory is that it's abstract---it's not incidentally connected to anything, so there are fewer places for you to get sidetracked.
So go sign up for a math course on Coursera, or learn the lambda calculus. They are so alien from your everyday programming experience that you won't have anything to connect them to---until you do. But then you'll be coming at the new topic in the direction of abstract to concrete ("a trivial application of x") rather than concrete to abstract ("there's a greater truth here and I MUST understand it!").
That was my thought. Anything that can be grasped solely by reading wikipedia or blogs isn't actually very cutting-edge. Not to say that stuff on wiki or blogs can't be very difficult to grasp, if previously unfamiliar.
I'm like you. I write fairly vanilla production code, then I go home and work on alien technology. And I used to have the same problem as you: I'd get sidetracked and sidetracked, and somehow I went from writing a fart app to reading about type theory.
So I started skipping the fart app part, and started learning some more abstract theory. The nice thing abstract theory is that it's abstract---it's not incidentally connected to anything, so there are fewer places for you to get sidetracked.
So go sign up for a math course on Coursera, or learn the lambda calculus. They are so alien from your everyday programming experience that you won't have anything to connect them to---until you do. But then you'll be coming at the new topic in the direction of abstract to concrete ("a trivial application of x") rather than concrete to abstract ("there's a greater truth here and I MUST understand it!").