I’m not nearly as active in personal projects as others, but for me it always comes down to solving a problem I already have instead of looking for one that might not exist.
It means that I’m invested in the problem.
Sometimes that means digging into FOSS projects and seeing if I can contribute or just use it as is with a few local tweaks.
Sometimes that means learning new tools and technologies but not really doing any active dev work; it’s merely me learning about something so I understand it as I deploy on my home network.
A lot of time it means stepping back and re-evaluating the tools I use and analyzing how I use them and considering alternative hardware and workflows.
I find all of that keeps me more than busy enough while also keeping me learning skills that translate into other areas.
Edit:
Examples would be:
Learning about Plex, video streaming and hosting and encoding, various audio and video codecs, TV technologies, Audio technologies, etc…all from a simple desire to have a simplified, yet high end quality home theater setup in my living room.
How music services work, different bitstream sizes and how they effect things, what FLAC is, what Tidal MQ is, how DACs and AMPs work, various products and how they differ, etc…all cause wife asked me to switch from my noise canceling Bose QC35 II, so I decided to do a good setup of open backs and then see how best to take advantage of that.
Digging into how browsers function, how ad blockers function, digging into various FOSS projects like uBlock Origin, digging into Firefox and it’s mobile versions, digging into VPNS and TOR, and so on…all cause I decided I wanted to have a better understanding of my personal data, privacy, and security and see about finding a personal balance of convenience vs privacy and security
And I could go on and on about scoop and appget and winget and chocolaty for Windows and WSL as I look for better ways to optimize and simplify how I setup windows installs and stuff.
These are some personal things I tackled and continue to tackle, which in the end, taught me a bunch of various topics to various degrees.
I’m always looking for ways to change my hardware and software and home setup in order to improve my QoL and workflows and that’s an axe I find can constantly grind away at lol