My personal insight on this: toy projects are fun not because they're small in scope, but because there's no downside to failure. Production/professional softw

My personal insight on this: toy projects are fun not because they're small in scope, but because there's no downside to failure. Production/professional software has significant downsides when they fail (customer unhappiness, professional performance and incentives, etc). It's also why toy projects open up very innovative pathways. You tend to not be conservative with them, and once in a while something amazing ends up working. Bringing this non-conservativeness to professional software is a skill once developed makes your growth shoot up.