The recent Rails 7 updates are pretty fun, although you could argue that's all boring, which is kind of the point. If it's a matter of getting something accomplished quickly, with the outcome being the fun part, I like Rails for it. For just satisfying cool stuff I like a good pile of BASH and awk. I find it rewarding to pipe a bunch of stuff together and get things done that might feel like it has no business being done like that. The fun of it in this case comes from quickly automating things. To the OPs point of a job change, this feels outside of the initial considerations, but hey it's fun stuff and maybe you'd like it! At a minimum there's a ton of value in software developers understanding the environment their code runs on and there's often space for "devops" activities to do a healthy mix of work on software dev and operations kind of stuff.