What's a good side project, if one is not really interested in the problem space of the side project?
I.e. I mostly just program for money, so how do I motivate myself to do a side project I'm not interested in, just to learn the language?
I wonder if I could ask my employer for two weeks of time to "rewrite" parts of our backend in Elixir, just so I could scratch that itch, without any of the consequences of it actually reaching production.
I find building a simple game (like tictactoe) in Phoenix Liveview to be a good learning project. You can layer on multiplayer using Phoenix pubsub once you have a working one player version. You can also then layer on structs, typespecs, or any other idiomatic features of the language that you need practice in.
I really think that is the only way. My issue is that I want to make the most of my free time in order to help me in interviews. I think picking up Elixir/Phoenix wouldn't help me since there are less jobs and I would have to take focus away from a stack that I have a better chance of getting a job in.
I.e. I mostly just program for money, so how do I motivate myself to do a side project I'm not interested in, just to learn the language?
I wonder if I could ask my employer for two weeks of time to "rewrite" parts of our backend in Elixir, just so I could scratch that itch, without any of the consequences of it actually reaching production.
Like a programming language sabbatical