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https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-...
One big difference between then and now was that back then you wrote mainly from scratch and were in charge of most parts of your software, whereas today it is mainly about gluing various toolkits and frameworks together.
I've benefited a lot from the apps I've written to improve my day-to-day life.
Just to give you an example: I wrote a tool to sync my uni timetable from the proprietary system they're using to my Google Calendar - that way I have all my events in one place and I'm also notified of classes early enough so I can get to campus in time.
The idea is to start off by making bad decisions, and slowly refactoring your way to good abstraction, this helps you intuit the reason for abstractions.
Some thoughts:
1) Build your own database. Not a SQL db. Just something that takes records on a cli and enables retrieval. Persist the data. Support better queries/
2) Maze solver.
3) Snake game
4) Helper/Solver for something like Wordle.
5) Chat server (but I like the HTTP server idea. Annoying thing is newer HTTP versions have gotten complicated).
I think there are twenty to fifty of these little things we have all done in our career, and either forgotten them or it felt too natural to register. Wish someone compiles a list of such projects some day. It would bring back joy in some of the coder-at-heart folks lives.
My journey as a software developer began in the 80's at MIT by writing 3D graphics code on a Symbolics Lisp Machine. Some fond memories: https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-... One big difference between then and now was that back then you wrote mainly from scratch and were in charge of most parts of your software, whereas today it is mainly about gluing various toolkits and frameworks togethe…
I believe you're in the middle of two points, on one end, you don't want to write something trivial. On the other, you don't want to write something too new or cutting edge, as you're solo. Finding great projects to work on somewhere in the middle can be difficult. I'd suggest that while you're finding your feet programming during this time, focus on software engineering, design patterns, and other SWE principles (SO…
Do the opposite of this, please....for the love of all that is holy.
The people who care about that stuff are complete douche bags. I used to be one of them.
Build things for regular people.