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!)

When I got my kid some time ago I remember how quickly I realized my productive time in life just got reduced by magnitudes. For sure, probably it's not the late night debugging sessions that I'll remember when I'm old - but still. Anyways this freaked me out in a way that suddenly all personal growth had to count. No more making "another web app" or "another game". It has to be deep and dense. And that made me realize that the decade of business app development experience is quite far from system level software. Which is the reason I'm looking for ways to contribute - where a community can help with the context.