I work at an Infrastructure Cloud company. I design and implement API and Database schemas, I plan out backend workflows and then implement the code to perform the incremental steps of each workflow. That’s lots of code, and a little openapi and other documentation. I dig into bugs or other incidents. That’s spent deep in Linux and Kubernetes environments. I hopefully build monitors or dashboards for better visibility into issues. That’s spent clicking around observability tooling, and then exporting things I want to keep into our gitops repo. Occasionally, I’ll update our internal WebUI for a new feature that needs to be exposed to internal users. That’s react and CSS coding. Our external facing UI and API is handled by a dedicated team.
When it comes to learning, Id say find a problem you have and try to build something to improve that problem. Building a home lab is a great way to give yourself lots of problems. Ultimately, it’s about being goal oriented in a way where your goal isn’t just “finish this class”.
You’re going to a lot of effort to not actually mention what this thing is, which makes me wonder what it is and I suspect knowing that would provide additional and useful context.