More challenging projects every programmer should try
web.eecs.utk.edu
More challenging projects every programmer should try
1–10 of 232 posts
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#2I would also recommend, if someone is interested in games, to do Tetris. It's a simple concept that is trickier than expected once you have to figure out the details of how it all comes together.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#3I would also recommend, if someone is interested in games, to do Tetris. It's a simple concept that is trickier than expected once you have to figure out the details of how it all comes together.
> figure out the details of how it all comes together
Damn, that was good.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#4The database project is quite the rabbit hole if you start chasing performance. I have learned some amazing things about just how fast a 3~4ghz CPU core actually is from this journey.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#5Being able to do challenging projects is a cold comfort when by far the most challenging project I’ve ever faced was trying to build something people would pay.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#6Being able to do challenging projects is a cold comfort when by far the most challenging project I’ve ever faced was trying to build something people would pay.
Ah, but that isn't a programming problem (or at least, usually not primarily a programming problem). It's a product and marketing problem.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#7Write a toy compiler for a basic like language, you'll learn about what your languages are actually doing.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#8Write a toy compiler for a basic like language, you'll learn about what your languages are actually doing.
Author here. I agree! That was one of the projects from the original project list that I posted a year ago (https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/challengingprojects.html).
In fact, this summer I wrote a 3-part tutorial series on implementing a BASIC compiler: Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler (https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html)
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#9As someone who has played with writing trading bots but never traded them with real money, some advice: if your results seem too good to be true, they probably are. Your trading bot may be doing unrealistic things or its results may not be reliable if the following are true:
- You are trading in a market with low liquidity or one that is controlled by a small number of market participants. I'm not an expert but I think this would apply more to markets like penny stocks and less to big markets like forex for major currency pairs
- You are not taking transaction costs into account or not doing so properly
- Your bot makes a low number of trades, making the results close or equivalent to lucky coin flips
- Your bot is simply making trades that cannot be executed, or may be doing simulated trades of something that is not actually tradable. This applies to a large number of research papers that assume you can just buy and trade the S&P 500 itself. You can trade ETFs that are tied to an index but an index is not a tradable instrument in of itself. Once you realize this, a lot of papers seem very weird
- You are not modelling other aspects of the trading process realistically, such as assuming the bot has infinite funds to trade, allowing it to take unlimited losses and continue trading when in reality you'd be hit with a margin call and your trading would be stopped
- Your code is committing any number of data snooping errors where the bot is asked to trade at time A (say the open of a trading session) but has access to future data (say the closing price of that day, future data that would not actually exist in a live environment)
- Depending on what you believe about how market conditions change over time, your bot may have worked in the past but would not work if used today. I.e., the market may have adapted to whatever edge your bot may have discovered
There are probably lots more pitfalls I don't even know about since I'm not an actual trader.
I'm not discouraging anyone from playing around or trying things, of course. I think it's great fun, which is why I do it.
Here's the good news: if you realize you don't actually have an edge and avoid risking your hard-earned money, you come out ahead of almost all people who ever trade.
Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try
#10Being able to do challenging projects is a cold comfort when by far the most challenging project I’ve ever faced was trying to build something people would pay.
Ah, but that isn't a programming problem (or at least, usually not primarily a programming problem). It's a product and marketing problem.
[deleted]