Thank you for sharing digital gardening. No idea how did I miss this all along. I always kept a bunch of lists with evolving ideas and evaluations and they do help figuring out some next steps. And I feel this digital gardening could give it a way better shape.

Your point on keeping serious stuff for work makes sense. I do "recreational coding" often - and that's fun indeed. Though specifically I'm trying to get into system level development, and as a business layer engineer I feel the gap is way too big to get there with the usual-suspect home projects (compiler, vm, etc) - without experiencing what makes a toy project a production-quality one.

(I'll def binge watch those How It's Build videos, thanks for that too!)