Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

Hi HN, since my kid was born (almost 16 months ago) I haven't had much time to learn new things, which is something I have always enjoyed. Similarly to many people, I learn a lot by doing some kind of project (big or small). But since my time is rather constrained, it would like to do some "scratch my itch" kind of project, something that may be useful enough to keep using it.

I though of asking you, people at HN, what kind of "scratch your own itch" projects have you done or are doing?

I'd like to do something computer related (to learn some Golang), but I'm curious about non-computer projects as well.

1) Semantic search for legal documents. Found it annoying that, as a lawyer, I have to use search engines that require me to guess the keywords that might be used in the documents I'm looking for... as well as to skim through the entire documents the system found in order to judge whether or not they are relevant to my case.

2) Discovering audiobooks I'll enjoy. Someone here on HN mentioned "random sampling" as a great technique to get a feel for a domain without getting biased by one's pre-conceived notions. I thought that would be awesome for books, to literally "not judge them by their cover".

3) Search engine for pre-owned Teslas. Quickly see what's good value based on age/mileage per price, as well as being able to see how long I'll have to wait, on average, to get a particular set of features for a particular price (based on historical market data).

Plus several others.

this year I learned astrophotography and then I learned deck building/carpentry as I needed a deck to raise the telescoped above the fence line. https://www.astrobin.com/users/bhouston/ if you automate you astrophotography rigs via things like ASIAIR or Nina you can control it all remotely from inside.

Also wrote a behavior graph library like Unreal Engines blueprints, intended to be used by say no code Threejs projects, and it works well: https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

For me it was getting into microcontrollers and (microcontroller based) electronics.

Tinkering with IOT projects using an ESP32 is engaging because they offer both, a variety of high level connectivity features ( wifi, ble) and direct integration with sensors or other Hardware.

Modern ones can even be developed in Rust and are not as constrained hadrwarewise as earlier generations.

I recently got back into developing some small "just for me" games with Godot and also got a surprising amount of enjoyment out of trying out Blenders procedural geometry and material node systems.

In my day job I am doing resty cloudy things so my free time gets used die something else.

> One is a command line based database browser/editor. PhpMyAdmin for the terminal so to say. I do all my database work inside of this editor.

Isnt this just a shell? Like psql, for example?