I would say Rails is still in its Heyday. I've been writing ruby since 1.8.7 and I'm constantly surprised by the frequency of major releases of rails, and the backward compatibility (Rails 3 -> 5 was hard). I completely agree about the discipline required to keep a large project clean, although I find that true across the board with large codebases.
Network hobbyist here: an excellent home project is to setup your own PBX. Complete with VLAN's, and backups running on your favorite HV. Most importantly, use hard phones with SCCP.
It's a challenge of itself, and will force you to demonstrate your understanding
Resting next to me is a titanium ring, it is extremely light, resistant to ambient temp change, and is usually cool to the touch. It cost $15 or so. It wears in a really beautiful way, aging like it's enjoying itself.
On my finger is a tungsten carbide ring, it's extremely dense (that of gold, slightly heavier than uranium), and has a lot of interesting properties. It's warmed quickly by my fingers, and rings the most beautiful tone when I strike it with some bar stock of AI.
Wolfram has been a very nice metal in my life, I wish it was more common, and would love to try to add some knurling to it.
I have a work issued M1 Max, which has an incredible amount of computational power.
I wanted a personal computer, and purchased an identical machine, M1 Max, 64Gig, whatever. I realized 4 days later that it wasn't possible for me to push my personal machine anywhere near this machines limits. I returned it, and bought an extremely cheap ($240?) MacBook Pro, i5 - 2017.
It hasn't slowed me down, and my strategy is to use macOS and not sign in with my Apple ID. No Mac App Store, iCloud, etc. I use App tamer and little snitch to eke out any performance gains possible... it's an excellent machine, and I'm so happy with it.
I want to thank Apple for introducing this express route in the rat race, which has lead to an extremely friendly second market of intel, and 1st generation M's.
I implore you to ask yourself if you really need the next generation, or even the previous one before purchasing
Way back when (2006?), a friend of mine sold wallhacks for online games. It was his software, written in C++, and it was considered to be pretty much on a level of its own.
Anyway, IIRC, Casper had a piece of software wrap his executable which would generate a hash from the purchasers PC, I believe it was hardware- Hard drives, graphics cards, whatever.
It was extremely difficult to determine who was a new customer, and who was a customer who upgraded their hardware. It ended up being a lot of maintenance - but it was cool to see behind the scenes, so to say.
It was also interesting to see another league of players form: dedicated cheating servers. Who had the best hacks amongst the hackers. At first, it was walling (seeing through walls), and then aimbots. Aimbots got better, and finally aimbots which calculated the spray patterns.
He ended up having a baby and taking a professional software job
Anyway, I would recommend YouTube. Find a series you can follow along. Best of luck!