I'm still in that boat, and I am an 8 YoE "Software Engineer". I recently got into boardgame.io library (also made by a Googler, coincidentally) and it is a fantastic library.

I've attempted to make min-max CLI board game simulations before but failed. Also tried (still somewhat active) to make a 2D artillery game and got close, but just kept getting bogged down in framework (actually migrating from framework to framework) and other chores. Currently it uses LibGDX.

With this boardgame lib I just wrote game logic. It was fun, for a change! Plus it has multiplayer and integrates with React really well for a UI so it's actually useful.

I just wanted the CLI boardgame sims to find the best moves/races in games I play IRL. With this I can actually have other people play and maybe show it off at some point.

I had to write my own font rendering code for lack of much in the way of general purpose libraries for doing it in 3-D engines back around 2005. Your options were, more or less, to pay through the nose for Scaleform, to roll your own, or to use something really ugly. So I had to learn some basic typography to tie Freetype into a text rendering engine, which got me practical experience with editing font files, anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, processing digraphs, Unicode, the works.

Web 2.0 started more or less right after that, so interest in digital typography in general exploded. I ended up working on some applications of text layout in non-left-to-right and pictograph languages for 2D canvas, SVG, and web based image manipulation in general. So out of sheer coincidence my hobby work messing with OpenGL/Freetype was suddenly directly relevant.