I was having very similar thoughts to you about a month ago. For me I decided to take a bit more of a “holistic” approach in the sense that I wanted to learn backend development, architecture etc so decided to create a website and set everything up by scratch.

I over engineered everything - I have a CI/CD pipeline for a wordpress website that I really do not need but it meant that I now know how to do it.

Not only that I force myself once a week to write about what I’ve learned that week for my development for my blog that nobody really know exists. But it keeps me accountable for having to continuously learn and improve.

I’m currently setting up my website in various regions then knocking them out to see how I can make sure everything stays online whilst also piping all my server logs to a logging platform.