The absolute peak of my software journey has ultimately been coding my own website and publishing its code on GitHub.
I'm aware you might be thinking "how fascinating" sarcastically. But at least it's a pleasant feeling to know that one can step outside packaged solutions and shape not just the appearance but also the structure according to their own preferences. When needed, I can add things, when needed, I can expand the site to become an API, when needed, I can take the database and write everything from scratch. Best of all, I can take the code from this site and expand upon it.
This is important because this was the primary reason Heft-Ahter came to an end. Publishing a new issue took approximately five hours, and this was nothing but menial labor. What we did was cutting and cropping images one after another and writing the story's name on top of them. Of course, if we knew CSS, we wouldn't have done these absurdities, but when we needed to expand the site, we would have had to reconceptualize the entire concept—thanks to WordPress. Now there's no WordPress, I can simply add whatever I want with Ruby code. This truly makes one feel much lighter.