I've already done some akka/scala work professionally, and separately, some api development with play/scala, so for a side project of mine I've been working on

I've already done some akka/scala work professionally, and separately, some api development with play/scala, so for a side project of mine I've been working on an idea that requires api endpoints served by an akka cluster backend. Now that I have a few of the required endpoints and a working cluster, I've been working on learning React on the frontend, which is new to me. The next few months will be crazy because I'll be learning how to bring in some async communications between frontend and backend. Not really sure how to start with that on the frontend, but I imagine it'll be sockets or SSE from the backend. Separately I dabble with Ng's coursera ML course but aside from writing jupyter notebooks with the octave kernel, which I enjoy - latex math equations are so pretty - I find the subject material a little boring. I like graphical structures though so maybe interest will pick up when they get into neural nets.