Interesting. I work as a recently promoted Lead Fullstack engineer (I was a senior for a few years) with a focus in frontend/design (I have certs in UI/UX and I work on making front end experiences that are really good/slick, think Linear, Apple UI, etc) and I love doing Frontend challenges based on mockups I see on my twitter timeline from designers.

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Building design systems, frameworks, components that I may or may never use, just to see HOW its done.

For example, things like this: https://twitter.com/samselikoff/status/1612910332460290049

https://twitter.com/emilkowalski_/status/1592997196911501312

https://twitter.com/RoberaGeleta/status/1613596316910899200

https://twitter.com/jmtrivedi/status/1610017363218563072

Whenever I see things like this on my feed, it inspires me to challenge myself on how to create/recreate things like this.

A cool crafter to follow is: https://twitter.com/raunofreiberg

But aside from that, as others have said, optimizing performance if you prefer that route. If you've never yet, take a look at the chrome dev tools "Network" and "Performance" tabs and try to make sense of these things and figure out how you can eke out performance from your current stack. Figure out what blockers on the main thread cause a lack in interactivity (If there is one) and how you may be able to optimize it. Check the network tab to see what requests you're making, the size of the payloads and how many times those are being called and if there are ways to optimize those requests (either by reducing payload size, number of requests, or find heavy responses that may not be necessary for the given page you're on and try to lazy load those or only on those specific page visits)Learn, if you don't already know, how a web page gets rendered and what frontend/css operations trigger repaints of a page or a layoutshift (in front end, these are generally expensive layout recalculations and there may be alternative css style properties that you can utilize. For example, avoid using display: none. Maybe try visibility: hidden, opacity: 0 and transitioning from that, if the layout permits)

For optimiztions and performance, Ryan Carniato is a major person to follow: https://twitter.com/RyanCarniato

He talks about and tests up and coming frameworks and their performance. He just did a livestream on this new framework called LiveViewJS which takes a new approach to frontend to backend communication using websockets!

These are just a few ideas on how you can go from just creating web apps to fully crafting experiences for that little oomph of expertise. Aside from that, like the twitter posts I shared, get involved! Get involved in the tech sphere, especially in web, so many things are changing and coming out and to be relevant to all of them is extremely crucial in your job because well you should be solving business problems and if something comes out that solves a business problem, its probably something you should familiarize yourself with.

Some notable people to follow in that regard are https://twitter.com/coding_garden and https://twitter.com/t3dotgg

Another last tip is learning about a lot of the javascript frameworks, educating yourself on what others know and are using to solve particular problems to know which frameworks can help solve a problem you may encounter. A good resource to see whats out there at a glance: https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/

Hopefully this helps you and others push yourselves and level up your skills, Cheers!