One of the things to reconcile with working in a field is that what interests you and what you need to create or provide as a service commercially is not always the same thing.
If doing only one then it’s like throwing one ball - it is quite doable but monotonous.
Personal projects
Publishing personal side projects as blogs is great practice and ongoing personal learning. I use these to improve the efficiency of my end to end workflow and also to try out different tools, packages and functionality.
Open source projects
Contributing to open source projects mixes interesting subject matter and continuous learning but also commercial relevance and generally involves collaboration not necessarily found in personal projects.
So working on personal projects, open source and commercial projects becomes an art form, like a juggling act.
And blogging about these projects becomes the new resume, showcasing these skills.