Pick a small, simple project that will force you to learn new things and put pieces together. My favorite starter server project is building a super simple URL

Pick a small, simple project that will force you to learn new things and put pieces together. My favorite starter server project is building a super simple URL shortener. You just need to render a page with a form, accept a POST from that form submission with the URL to shorten, hash the URL, store it in a database, return the hash, and set up a GET that maps your hashes to your URLs by looking up against the database. The most important thing with beginner projects is scope. Pick MVP versions of things you want to make and build out.