Prepping for grad school I took on a number of projects via youtube tutorials. One of the most extensive and rewarding was building the arcade classic Galaga from scratch in C++, it was a massive time sink but really gave me some good experience in OOP and how tedious GUI programming can be.

Nowadays I have a home-lab with a more infrastructure focused approach. After an immediate need to understand the k8s stack at work, I took it upon myself to set up an ESXI hypervisor on an old, unused desktop. I now have it running a local EKSA stack. Not as fun as Galaga, but kinda.