Something I have found really great is to purposely build something you will never ever even be remotely tempted to ship but that has some degree of complexity

Something I have found really great is to purposely build something you will never ever even be remotely tempted to ship but that has some degree of complexity to it. What's great about this approach is you are never forced to be bogged down in details that aren't relevant to you. If you ship a product and I mean like really try to ship it with a launch and everything, you will spend a tonne of time on a) non-technical tasks that don't matter to your day job and b) technical tasks that don't matter to your day job. For example graphic design, copywriting, marketing etc. All great stuff if you want to go the route of actually trying to launch a company. Terrible to get caught up in if you just want to learn to write production grade systems. Technical tasks you have to spend time on for stuff you actually will ship do have some value but really it can be limited. You might spend time to build deployment pipelines or auth or HA deployments etc. All of that stuff is great IMHO and I personally value having done a lot of it but to a lot of engineers who work on established code bases and just never ever touch that stuff I feel like it's not a huge value add. With a project you know you'll never ship you can focus only on the parts you want to. You can then layer lots of little mini-projects into it and use it to try out new things over time. I guess I'd recommend trying to ship a real project solo at least once too. It gives you perspective.