A 12kg weight hanging 6 feet in the air seems a little dangerous to me. Definitely less dangerous than a kerosene lamp, but I'd be worried about poorly attached weights falling if someone bumps their head on it.
I completely agree. I had never programmed before my first college course, and while I had a lot of fun in intro programming courses, I always felt way behind everyone else and didn't do particularly well. Those first couple of classes filtered me out of any chance at getting into the CS major, and I ended up transferring schools to study it.
I think this looks great. Thought I'd let you know I found a typo though. In the jQuery section, last paragraph, "Riot takes a puristic approach and does not allow you to do mix any logic inside HTML views."
Reminds me of Clayton Christensen's book How Will You Measure Your Life? which deals with questions of dividing time between work and family. It isn't long and I'm glad I read it (though I wouldn't call it a page turner). One of the points he makes is that your family life is like any other investment, and you need to actively invest in it to be able to get a good return later in life.
I have way less experience than you, I'm 24 and still in school, but I feel like the people I work with have a much bigger impact on how I feel about work than the work itself. I don't expect or want to be best friends with everyone I work with, but I think that basically anything can be enjoyable if you enjoy spending time with your coworkers. So my opinion, for what it's worth, would be to look for people that you would be excited to work with more than a project you'd be excited to work on.
It scares me that you're 25 and feeling burned out, I worry about that sometimes.