As a tech person that started my carrer as a developer and faded into to Sysadmin/SRE roles because my proximity with linux and open source I really like programming and was thinking about how do it more.
I was thinking about this list with projects around the tooling that I use in my daily work because it can improve my mental model around infrastructure and programming, but of course, you can create a micro saas, poke with functional programming, contribute to open source, or create games.
Projects to code
Krew plugin - Create a krew plugin and learn how it can integrate in kubectl and how to work with K8S API.
Terraform Provider - Code a new terraform provider to allow other interact with a service that only provide REST API to define the state.
CDK extension - Create a extension for CDK can be helpful to understand how the building blocks are made and extend CDK IaC for another systems.
Prometheus Exporter - Prometheus is the CNCF metric database for containers world, create an exporter that fetches data from systems that do not provide any metrics (and you can’t change code to create /metrics)
Azure DevOps Plugin - Working years with Azure Devops really felt that a lot of plugins could be created for the platform.
Drone.io Plugin - Drone was a brief air for self-hosted CI/CD, besides the limitations around it, it is very easy to start to use, and the plugin system is easy too.
Woodpecker CI Plugin - Woodpecker CI is a fork of Drone.io that is gaining popularity and has the same great plugin workflow.
Github Actions (Custom Action) - Create your own Github Actions task for apps that aren’t supported or custom workflows reducing Github boilerplate.
Backstage Plugin - Working with IdPs (Internal Developer Platforms) can require integration with multiple systems to keep the workflow lean, and sometimes not all systems have support for Backstage steps and actions.
ArgoCD Plugin Generator - Argo has a huge influence in the Gitops world for Kubernetes one of the ways you can extend its usage with code is to create a custom generator allowing control over the way that argo apps will be created.
VScode plugin - VScode is versatile and works well, creating plugins to facilitate development or test systems can be a good learning process.
VScode Macro Custom configurations - Another way that can be more fun is to extend macros and plugins for Vscode and speed up your editing skills.
Open Telemetry Custom Collector - Improve observability and mechanisms for local apps can be a good match for a customized open telemetry collector.
Cloudformation Custom Resources - Custom resources with Cloudformation using lambda to manipulate the state can improve the understanding of infrastructure as code state management.
Ideas for modules to be exposed
Terraform Module - Creating modules for Terraform to abstract a lot of resources with a set of parameters can be a good exercise.
Ansible Playbook - Another infrastructure as code package that can be created to facilitate others is Ansible playbooks.
Docker Image - Container images are the groundwork of Cloud Native Apps creating your own for custom workflows can be useful.
Helm Chart - Charts are the principal way to distribute Kubernetes apps, deciding how to abstract too many configuration options for the users can be a challenge to practice too.
And have fun at final =)