Ask HN: How does everyone do it?

I've been a programmer (coder, whatever) for about 6 years now. I had worked as a Mac repair guy for about 9 years before that and took a job with an SEO company that turned out being more marketing than technical but it sparked my interest in HTML and Javascript.

I started with PHP and MySql and tinkering around with my own things and eventually landed a gig coding the stuff for a local web site that was going up. I started out way out of my depth but figured things out as I went along and ended up getting good enough to recognize my earlier mistakes and improve my code as I went along.

Fast-forward about a year and I landed a job doing web development for a local company. I worked there for almost 4 years before recently taking a new job and learned a lot in the process. I started to branch out and try other languages. I've played around with Ruby on Rails but haven't built anything with it yet. I've messed around with trying to make some of my own command line tools in C (still have a lot to learn there). I briefly played with Java for something different to try. Most recently though, I jumped head-first into working on an iPad app. Much like my beginnings with PHP, I learned my way through a lot of stuff I didn't understand at first and am now able to recognize the crap I was making before. But it took a very long time.

This is the part that gets me. I see posts on here all the time about people that just decided to take up programming one day and wham, some ridiculously short amount of time later they've published their first iPhone game or a web site that's already making money. This stuff takes time, so where does everyone find that?

I'm like a lot of the people on here. I've got a day job, wife, dogs, and pretty soon a kid. All of these things eat at the time I have in a day. So how does everyone else do it? How do you find time in the day to work on your side projects and actually accomplish something?