Could you give me an example of what you mean by a “long-term project” for someone at my level, and how you would balance it with continuing DSA?
the key is that it is big and related/applied to something you like, such as a hobby
my first was a stock picking system (fool's errand), my PhD work was a system to extract math formula from data, post PhD was a deterministic code generation engine (pre-dating LLM code gen)
unfamiliar with the DSA acronym
So basically, you recommend choosing something I’m genuinely interested in, even if a similar application already exists, and building my own version from scratch. Then whenever I encounter something I don’t know, I learn it as I go.