What's more is that my degree wasn't the most rigorous and in fact taught a couple of subjects pretty weakly. I saw community college courses that would have given me a better grounding in core subjects (eg data structures).

I have a few months free in which I'd like to do something that addresses these twin issues. Bonus points if it makes me more employable. I see other people's resumes full of amazing looking side projects which are both technically challenging and look absorbing to work on, but the best ideas I have these days are the same cookie cutter full stack project ideas that you see around the internet.

I guess I'm wondering if anyone here has faced this issue and/or can suggest anything. I'm talking textbooks, project ideas, anything. Some things I've thought of:

* Invest in contributing to an open source project - not sure how to pick the right one though * Work through nand2tetris - unfortunately looks like a lot of overlap with my Architecture course, but especially the later projects look cool, and it's almost universally praised for being interesting * Pick a textbook/topic from https://teachyourselfcs.com/ to work through - so much analysis paralysis here though * Write my own versions of some lower level tools using C/Rust/Go/Java - something like https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x - I enjoyed the classic 'write your own shell in C' assignment, but again seems fairly uninspired