There's no need to be creative about it. I never try to (re-)invent the wheel myself. Once I'm done with #1 on the list I posted, I evaluate the strengths and w

There's no need to be creative about it. I never try to (re-)invent the wheel myself. Once I'm done with #1 on the list I posted, I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the language and pick something that probably already exists. Say for the case of Rust when I was learning it ~3 years ago, that was a private dropbox-like service which syncs files I listed in a config file to a GCP filestore bucket. Nothing fancy or complicated but still - doing checksums, syncing, error reporting, all the usual stuff. Eventually further extended it to encrypt personal documents before pushing them and so on. Doesn't have to be big or complicated or something that no one has done before. Matter of fact, doing something that already exists is the better option cause you can transfer concepts.