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Try to enjoy what you have, how lucky you are to be where you are with your skills. Some people can just dream of those.
Sometimes, it seems that we lose our passion but we just need to stop, refresh our mind and start enjoying small things in life. The excitement and passion will be back..at least, that's what happened to me.
Take it easy and stay positive :)
But my go too's were stepping back to interests before tech took over, read books on other topics. I did philosophy, some math, and books I wanted to read but didn't before. This was the best compartmentalizations for me and helped me gain perspective and reflect.
I also realized passion, dedication, happiness are all for the most part a choice we make and I needed something I could do for 10yrs+ and not regret. So I made my choices and am ready to stick with it.
1. Find Inspiration. It could be music, watching a movie about a start-up or some other inspiring story. For me it was listening to Brian Stevens keynote speech from the RedHat Summit on YouTube. If you listen to the past 3 years he makes it clear that software developers and Linux are going to rule the world. Use this as a tool to get you into your command center to get stuff done.
2. Do not come home from work and go to your command center or computer room. You need time away from the computer to remember what your passionate about. Watch TV, go exercise, spend time with your family, whatever makes you happy.
3. Go to bed early. When your lying in bed, think about your side projects and what you want to build. Go into detail about the code, UI, technology stack, where your going to host it. This will help you dream in code and get you excited to wake up.
4. Wake up early. I get up around 3am without an alarm clock now because after dreaming about my passion projects I'm so excited to get up and make things happen. You would be surprised how focused you can be at 3am with no distractions. In the last 6 months since I started this new me I have read over 20 books and wrote several documents for my passion project.
5. Setup the perfect development workstation. I use my 27 inch mac for development but I also have 3 laptops running Linux. I told myself I was going to setup and learn all the best productivity tools to help me code better/faster. I setup my dotfiles perfectly with all the vim plugins I wanted to use, tmux scripts, and pushed it up to github and synced it to all my workstations. It is such a rush to have everything running perfectly.
6. Start a ritual or habit and set goals. Document all your ideas for your passion projects in as much detail as possible. Go to Trello or Evernote and document everything. Include pictures, links, sound, video, whatever to help you describe your idea and get yourself motivated. I call mine my 5 year project plan even though it will only take me about a year and a half. (Part of my plan is to save money and move to SV.)
As a software engineer you have more outside the field opportunities then others may have. Since we are very quick learners we can pick up things unnatural fast compared to others which is why you see many software engineers or programmers owning multi-billion dollar businesses in Silicon Valley. Ever meet someone that people keep telling him or her they can't do x,y or z and they end up doing it on a massive scale way beyond what anyone thought they were capable of (Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.).
It is all about finding what you like doing for fun, maybe the software your building at work is not fun, many go into game development mobile apps or cryptography and that excites them along with bringing in a nice paycheck if they do it for their own business.