What worked for me was writing an image editor. Lots of different filters and effects I could add to it.

Then games; if you do that, start with minesweeper or chess (without AI), add features and complexity to do whatever seems fun. You don't need to bother with a fancy game engine at this level, vanilla JavaScript or python or whatever else you're using is good enough, everything is good enough.

If you love sounds and how they work, make a sound processor. Music, procedural music composition.

Main thing is just keep yourself excited for the next step; what that means for you is something only you can answer.

For programming, learn a new thing to do with your language (network programming, say). Or learn a second language.

For software engineering... that winds up being all about the accurate communication of technical information, so work on reading and writing technical documentation. Also more architecture-level issues rather than fits-in-a-few-lines-of-code kind of problems.

There's also NAND to Tetris [1], csprimer [2], and/or lists like these [3] or codecrafters [4].

[0] https://third-bit.com/sdxpy/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-second-Pri...

[2] https://csprimer.com/courses/

[3] https://www.andreinc.net/2024/03/28/programming-projects-ide...

[4] https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog