Thank you for the respones. Do you find that your side projects are mainly guided by general interest mixed with utility? Taking an example from myself, I find Sudoku pretty interesting. By interesting I mean that I find them fun to do and I am pretty sure that generating them is an interesting challenge that _seems_ like I could accomplish it, in some form.

Now at this stage, I'll end up doing some preliminary research on Sudoku solving and generation programmatically. I'll realize this is a by and large solved problem and someone has already written a program that will do anything I would do in every programming language under the sun. I start to wonder - Is this worth my time to do? It's that question that starts to cast doubt. Also partially if there is so much literature on the topic I wonder if I am just "copying" or if I really am doing something valuable/learning.

Your comment on learning budget is insightful and appreaciated, I can already think of examples that I can apply that to, so thank you.