Maplibre[1] + PMTiles + Felt's "tippecanoe"[2] (it can output .pmtiles) are an awesome combination for self-hosted web maps if you're ok with being locked into a Web Mercator projection
for pretty much any geospatial source you can convert to .pmtiles via GDAL[3] and tippecanoe
(.shp .gpkg ...) | ogr2ogr -> .geojson | tippecanoe -> .pmtiles
for OpenStreetMap data there's planetiler[4], and and openmaptiles[5] styles that work with Maplibre
with those combinations you've got a great start to something you can host for pennies on AWS S3+CloudFront or Cloudflare R2, with an open source data pipeline
I'm a student trying to upskill in geospatial/compsci. What kinds of projects could you make with all of this? Any good starting points you'd recommend?
Not OP, but almost anything where "a map" is the output will be a hugely big learning opportunity for you. Static maps, print-quality maps, interactive web maps -- the experience of building any of those will bring lots of learning. (That's how I got started.)
for pretty much any geospatial source you can convert to .pmtiles via GDAL[3] and tippecanoe (.shp .gpkg ...) | ogr2ogr -> .geojson | tippecanoe -> .pmtiles
for OpenStreetMap data there's planetiler[4], and and openmaptiles[5] styles that work with Maplibre
with those combinations you've got a great start to something you can host for pennies on AWS S3+CloudFront or Cloudflare R2, with an open source data pipeline
[1] https://maplibre.org/
[2] https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe
[3] https://gdal.org/
[4] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
[5] https://openmaptiles.org/styles/
ps I find GDAL/ogr2ogr documentation pretty hard to parse, as an example to get you started