I find it funny how the updates slowly seem to realise that people can't access the GitLab issue because it's down.
Starts with "details in", then "details will be posted", then "will be posted once available" then "once availability has been restored"
The things I'm doing are mainly just as a hobby at the moment, so the advice of others may be more relevant to you, but I've learned a lot from and really enjoyed just creating a really overkill stack for a simple web app I made.
I'm talking setting up grafana for monitoring, using ansible/terraform, setting up backups, etc etc. Lots of just picking cool software I've heard about and trying to stuff it into my use case.