If it's coming towards the end of the year, solve Advent of Code in the new language you learned. AoC scales gently. On day 1 if you can't see how to do it that's going to be because you didn't really understand your new language. By day 25 it's very likely that you can't figure out how to solve the problem yet in any language, if you're up for it, maybe solve it in your existing favourite and then try the new one.

Because lots of people do AoC, especially in popular languages like Rust or C++, you can see other people's solutions in the AoC Reddit solutions thread each day, which are often inspiring -- you learn new idioms, library features, or even whole CS concepts.

I never got a proper chance to experience Rust at work but always wanted to give it a go.

So I went through the Build your own Redis challenge by https://codecrafters.io. It was a a good excuse to get my hands dirty with all the different Rust concepts (with a bit of structure).

I'm trying to write a Rust program to transform gamepad inputs to MIDI events -- mainly CC, so that one can control a filter with a joystick for example. But it should also be possible to play notes. (The field of MIDI controllers appears quite limited, and "pads" available on some keyboards are not fun to use at all.)

I implemented this in a webapp, but it's really awkward to have to go through the browser back in the DAW. An executable would be more elegant.

PS1: Some DAWs allow for gamepad input, but it's usually limited, difficult to configure, and buggy (Reaper for example has a bug that was first raised in... 2009 and never fixed).

PS2: I had hoped LLMs would help... but boy do they not! ;-)

Highly specific, but in my operating systems course, we wrote a shell in C, it was very fun. I plan to write it again, but in Rust (mostly out of fun), extend it, make it my daily driver.