Non tech hobbies that helped me with developement:

Lego technic/mecano/knex were a great way to learn about abstraction, you build modules that you can reuse somewhere else.

Cooking is similar, you notice useful patterns that you can reproduce. E.g. roux, which is butter and flour is used for a lot of sauces, then add milk and you get béchamel, which is again used for a lot of sauces.

Coffee brewing helps because I can't focus if I don't get coffee.

Has anyone here used MongoDB for relational databases? I am trying to use MySQL with Node but I feel like the whole thing is a mess. There are some ORMs like Knex or Sequelize for MySQL but they are pretty crap. I am thinking if I should just move onto MongoDB instead of MySQL, at the same time I feel a little dirty to store relational data in a document store :(

I just wanted to let you know that Knex.js is sooo awesome