I've been a software engineer for almost 10 years and looking back at my career I feel like I have not built absolutely anything. I've been working at corporations doing backend development which mainly involved maintaining existing services.
I don't code in my spare time as I'm too tired from work and need the space to recharge. I feel bad calling myself an engineer when I don't feel like I can build anything on my own or have any personal projects.
What should I do? What are some projects I could try that are less abstract in nature and involve building something tangible?
Even if it’s something you don’t particularly care about, you’ll be forced to translate some concepts between languages and that alone will teach you something. And the main benefit is you already know what the end result should be, so you can judge your solution on something concrete.
Some examples: implement cat, grep, find, small commands like that. Reimplement a logging library from one language to another. Create a tiny static site generator (with few features).
You’ll actually accomplish something tangible and you don’t have to suffer the weight of thinking up a new technique or tackling large unknown problems.