I do a lot of little projects and experiments. Early on in this process, I learned that there's a certain base functionality that is nice to have at hand, boilerplate that doesn't serve any purpose to write again and again for each one. I've gone through three major iterations here - the latest of which, jbDE, has an interesting inheritance structure where each project inherits from a base engine class. Projects just fill out some functions like OnRender() and OnUpdate(). This has proved very useful, so that I don't have to worry about windowing, shader compilation, these types of things that you want to have "Just Work". Information about my approach to engines is sprinkled through a number of my blog posts. You can find out more in the articles below: