In terms of the projects, one way that I help myself with that type of thing is to just sit down and build the interesting part standalone (if possible). Just w

In terms of the projects, one way that I help myself with that type of thing is to just sit down and build the interesting part standalone (if possible). Just work through the hard part in raw language of choice, skip the boilerplate, project setup, assumption that anybody else but you is ever going to look at it and see if you can make it do the thing that you think you can make it do. Get to the other stuff later if you decide to pursue it further, but the fun is often translating what's in your brain to code even in it's simplest form. Very few people sit around dreaming up ideas and just can't wait...to write a bunch of tests and setup a CI.