How to practice C# without real world experience?

Hi all,

Age 56

Location: California

Working as software support engineer for last 6 years.

Have 30 years of overall software development experience. But not great experience. Just an okay experience.

Last time I worked with c# asp.net microsoft stack was back in 2014

I want to get back into learning middle layer of architecture like writing web services in C# and .net but I do not have opportunity at day job of doing so.

I will use online paid/free tutorials to get started. But I also have another idea for learning..

I would like to find public repositories open source code for c# .net web services etc. Make contributions at my level which at this point is beginners and gain real world experience. This will also help in my check in to the respository and build credibility as I check in more code or my code gets accepted by repo owner.

If that makes sense to you. Looking forward to your recommendations on how to achieve my goal mentioned above. I will also do google searches and do the best I can based on search results.

If you can help me get up and running for this goal, I do not mind paying you $$ for the help.

Thanks for reading and thank you in advance for your recommendations and suggestions.