I can code for fun on my "work" desk, but I need to clear the space of work-related items: any tab, terminal session, Slack/emails (!), IDE window, note, Docker

I can code for fun on my "work" desk, but I need to clear the space of work-related items: any tab, terminal session, Slack/emails (!), IDE window, note, Docker container, VPN,... For me, what separates work from fun is being able to focus on what makes you happy. When you work, you have constraints on both time and quality so your fun projects should feel liberated from those constraints. If you like software craftsmanship and elegance, work on a project you can pamper and grow. Make it extensively testable and tested, optimize hot paths, implement a full CI/CD pipeline with blue/green deployment, architecture for extensibility,... Or if you are like me and have a million things you want to try, pick one topic/use-case and aggressively strip its surroundings to a bare minimum. For example, when I want to play with a frontend framework I emulate the backend by hard-coding JSON responses. (When I can't do that anymore, a FastAPI server with no DB is very good for quick iterations.)