Every now and then spend a whole weekend (or just a week of after-work hours) learning the new hot X to the point you can honestly say you know something about it (it doesn't take that much for an experienced coder to learn a new thing) and bam, you have another buzzword for your CV. Select as needed to get through HR filters.
Still not the same as working experience. And honestly I'd rather get payed for tinkering around.
Resume Driven Development is where it's at. Docker? Our "modular monolith" works just fine, but with Microservices we can now rewrite everything in Rust and Elixir. Lock ourselves with yet another build / automation tool just to remove trailing whitespace. Add RethinkDB and Redis and that new graph database now that we're at it. Let's pray for updated NixOS binaries!
For toy projects I'll stick to OpenBSD, Perl and ancient tools like make, awk or even rc.
