Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More challenging projects every programmer should try

web.eecs.utk.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 232 posts

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#11

Post by username90 »

mooreds wrote: post #6
xwdv wrote: post #5

Being 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.

Being a good programmer helps though, technical challenging things tend to have much smaller and worse competition.

Like, you probably wont make a lot of money making another 2d platformer no matter how well you code, they are so easy to make that there are millions of them out there already. However if you make a performant and bug free factorio or minecraft clone you will at least get a few thousand people try it and from there it would grow if it is fun.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#13

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> it is really simple to create the basic "database". You can start by using the dictionary data structure that comes with whatever programming language you're using and slap a web API on top of it.

Better yet: do it in C. There's no "dictionary" object type so you have to make it yourself. You'll soon learn a whole bunch of fallacies about how those "dictionaries" actually work. After you spent a good deal of time doing that, you can switch to authentication/authorization, logging, storage, tracing, API management, resource quotas, and a raft of distributed computing issues.

I recommend basing it on Consul, it has a better general model than etcd.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#15

Post by Avtomatk »

xwdv wrote: post #5

Being 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.

I face the same problem, I think that programmers can be skilled in a lot of different tasks, but for large projects, our two hands and our brain are not enough, no matter how smart you are, you need co-founders, loneliness leads you to procrastinate eternally.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#16

Post by SilasX »

ashleyn wrote: post #7

Write a toy compiler for a basic like language, you'll learn about what your languages are actually doing.

Yes! nand2tetris.org has this. (Also available on Coursera.)

You write a compiler for a Java-like language in several steps: a parser that organizes the raw code, then a compiler that emits the virtual machine code, then a translator between the virtual machine code and assembly (and then, between assembly and binary).

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#17

Post by pjc50 »

henning wrote: post #9

As 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 thi…

I worked on a unique HFT system which was capable of starting the response packet before the incoming packet's final byte had arrived. Negative latency. If it mispredicted the future, it would simply scramble the trailer and cause the packet to fail UDP checksum.

It didn't make money in the real world because the quality of decision that could be made at that speed wasn't good enough.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#19

Post by mhh__ »

ashleyn wrote: post #7

Write a toy compiler for a basic like language, you'll learn about what your languages are actually doing.

I think, interestingly, that writing the middle of a compiler is actually the best learning as a programmer.

Parsing (should be) easy, the backend is hard but well documented and trodden, but the semantic analysis and error handling is where the real murky water is (Especially when you start trying t optimize it, like adding caching or threading or deferred execution)

Post reply on HN