Over the past several months, I built a personal reference suite of over 50 full-stack web applications spanning more than 20 categories of software development. It started as a way to document and formalize architectural patterns in isolated environments where each concept could be examined on its own terms.
It turned into a system, complete with its own infrastructure, engineering guidelines, and accompanying audio guides. And the process of designing it reinforced my understanding of software architecture in a way that working in any single codebase probably never could, because the whole point was to build the same patterns multiple times, in multiple contexts, until every architectural decision felt deliberate rather than inherited.