Maybe 13 years ago when I was a fresh and inexperienced dev in my first job, I was once asked to work on a C# side project at work where people could run common dev workflows (think running database migrations, deployments etc) by specifying them as XML instead of scripts.
I had fun, eventually they wanted things like conditional workflows which I had to think how to model in XML.
To anyone with even a bit of experience, they can tell that it wasn't long until this not-invented-here-driven-monstrosity of an idea was abandoned as it's not something you can do as a couple of hours per week side project and have it be massively useful in a short timeframe.
So it was a useless effort for the company, but as a very inexperienced dev, it was the first project where afterwards explanations of how things like lisp worked started to make sense to me intuitively considering how backwards I was in my naive attempts.
Even the project you're describing, learn to be ok with looking back on parts of your career and being thankful that only your employers money was being burned on "useless" things while you were taking forward the valuable lessons.
I had fun, eventually they wanted things like conditional workflows which I had to think how to model in XML.
To anyone with even a bit of experience, they can tell that it wasn't long until this not-invented-here-driven-monstrosity of an idea was abandoned as it's not something you can do as a couple of hours per week side project and have it be massively useful in a short timeframe.
So it was a useless effort for the company, but as a very inexperienced dev, it was the first project where afterwards explanations of how things like lisp worked started to make sense to me intuitively considering how backwards I was in my naive attempts.
Even the project you're describing, learn to be ok with looking back on parts of your career and being thankful that only your employers money was being burned on "useless" things while you were taking forward the valuable lessons.