You are in a position extremely comparable to one I've been in myself. I had the same feeling about my jobs, also hadn't worked for awhile, considered myself lazy/coasting, wanted to get hobby projects going but had trouble.
So, having had success with my hobby projects in the sense that I reached my technical/product goals and then ended up landing a great tech job off of them, here are my thoughts, in no particular order:
1. Tech stack doesn't exactly matter. Don't overthink it. I personally love a variety of languages and want to be fluent with django, flask, express, sinatra, node, spring, and sails. That is, however, impractical, and comparing them endlessly is unproductive. They can all do what you need. Some are more complex than others, and learning curve is IMO the most important point of comparison. I ended up going with expressJS which is fantastically straightforward to set up and work with, and is extremely powerful and flexible and mature. That was partly because I was already fluent in JS from doing frontend work.
2. I wouldn't really recommend tutorials. If you wanted to build (for example) a twitter clone, you probably already know you need backend code serving HTML views. So just follow through the "Hello world!" tutorial on your framework of choice until you have it serving HTML views, then build off that, progressively googling things as you add complexity, e.g. "how to do user login with django". If you encounter a bit of syntax or a concept you're unfamiliar with, google the shit out of it. If you find nothing, ask on stackoverflow. I have asked like 400 questions there. I'm shameless. Stackoverflow tells me my questions have helped 3.7 million other people over the past 6 years.
3. If you want to do Vue, do Vue! Great! Frankly I think the prominence of react now is so great that I would be reluctant to focus energies on something else, but any good company won't care if you already know it or not, because you can learn it on the job.
4. Kind of repeating myself, but don't look for "spotify vue tutorial project"....that'll get you nowhere. Figure out how to use Vue, then figure out how to use the spotify API, then tie them together on your own.
5. It really helps to nail down what you're using. I did a lot of comparing for where to host my application, a lot of googling "X vs Y" and finally went with Heroku. It really depends whether you want to be doing your own server administration or whether you want most of that handled for you. EC2 and digital ocean will leave you managing your server, where Heroku for instance will not. I strongly recommend heroku, personally, or something similar to it, for the stage you're at.
6. Once you nail down HOW you're going to deploy your product, like with heroku, DEPLOY IT IMMEDIATELY! Deploy your first line of HTML, the one that says "welcome to my website" and make sure you can see it at `your-website.com`, whatever your URL is! It's so motivating to get that link out of the way, to know you already have the setup ready to put the code into production. As you commit each new thing, keep adding it! Keep deploying! It will feel like you're really getting somewhere and keep you motivated. If you wait until it's finished to do all that, you're far less likely to ever get there because mentally it will feel like you're eons away from completion.
Thanks man! You're post resonated with me. I also believe I need the original "feel good" feeling of deploying something early to make my confidence go up.
So, having had success with my hobby projects in the sense that I reached my technical/product goals and then ended up landing a great tech job off of them, here are my thoughts, in no particular order:
1. Tech stack doesn't exactly matter. Don't overthink it. I personally love a variety of languages and want to be fluent with django, flask, express, sinatra, node, spring, and sails. That is, however, impractical, and comparing them endlessly is unproductive. They can all do what you need. Some are more complex than others, and learning curve is IMO the most important point of comparison. I ended up going with expressJS which is fantastically straightforward to set up and work with, and is extremely powerful and flexible and mature. That was partly because I was already fluent in JS from doing frontend work.
2. I wouldn't really recommend tutorials. If you wanted to build (for example) a twitter clone, you probably already know you need backend code serving HTML views. So just follow through the "Hello world!" tutorial on your framework of choice until you have it serving HTML views, then build off that, progressively googling things as you add complexity, e.g. "how to do user login with django". If you encounter a bit of syntax or a concept you're unfamiliar with, google the shit out of it. If you find nothing, ask on stackoverflow. I have asked like 400 questions there. I'm shameless. Stackoverflow tells me my questions have helped 3.7 million other people over the past 6 years.
3. If you want to do Vue, do Vue! Great! Frankly I think the prominence of react now is so great that I would be reluctant to focus energies on something else, but any good company won't care if you already know it or not, because you can learn it on the job.
4. Kind of repeating myself, but don't look for "spotify vue tutorial project"....that'll get you nowhere. Figure out how to use Vue, then figure out how to use the spotify API, then tie them together on your own.
5. It really helps to nail down what you're using. I did a lot of comparing for where to host my application, a lot of googling "X vs Y" and finally went with Heroku. It really depends whether you want to be doing your own server administration or whether you want most of that handled for you. EC2 and digital ocean will leave you managing your server, where Heroku for instance will not. I strongly recommend heroku, personally, or something similar to it, for the stage you're at.
6. Once you nail down HOW you're going to deploy your product, like with heroku, DEPLOY IT IMMEDIATELY! Deploy your first line of HTML, the one that says "welcome to my website" and make sure you can see it at `your-website.com`, whatever your URL is! It's so motivating to get that link out of the way, to know you already have the setup ready to put the code into production. As you commit each new thing, keep adding it! Keep deploying! It will feel like you're really getting somewhere and keep you motivated. If you wait until it's finished to do all that, you're far less likely to ever get there because mentally it will feel like you're eons away from completion.