Projects are fine if you already have the right mindset - because you are going to apply your current mindset to solving the problems that you will encounter on the project. People often need to adjust their mindset when working with BEAM languages.
Following along Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems but using Elixir/mix instead may just do that (the free sample almost covers the first 4 chapters).
If that is a bit advanced have a look at chapter 1 of Learn Functional Programming with Elixir (Pragprog) to see if that might appeal to you. If you like videos maybe Elixir for programmers is more up your alley.
In Elixir in Action you start out building a process-based key value store which later grows into a system using supervision and even plug and cowboy - it is kind of a much more elaborate version of Introduction to Mix.
Point is there are lots of resources using “little projects” which (instantly) guide and explain the decision making process that may not be familiar to you at this point.
Hmmm … “JavaScript Begineer” - as the term “Engineer” seems to have taken a bit of a beating lately.
