I totally agree that learning "just coding" per se should not be a goal. It should also help to solve some of your real problems and automation is one of the topic that is very likely you need to solve. When you do something that you like and at the same time need it pays off twice. In fact I got most of my programming skills by implementing simple automation task that I needed. I highly recommend AutoHotkey ( https://www.autohotkey.com/ ) if you are interested in automation. It is programming language with great automation capabilities and wonderful helpful community (last one is very important if you are new to programming).