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More challenging projects every programmer should try

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Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#111

Post by Waterluvian »

shhsshs wrote: post #107
Waterluvian wrote: post #54

Writing a Game Boy emulator has been the most fulfilling and interesting programming project in my life. I love, most of all, how modular the project is. I can do an hour here or there and make meaningful progress. I'm really eager to discover other very large programming projects that break down into sensible bites so well.

I had never considered an emulator to be anywhere inside of the realm of possible projects I could take on for fun. I just thought it would be too complex without having a ton of very specific knowledge. Your comment prompted me to go look up some other attempts, and I’m really glad I did. It seems much more approachable to me now. Thanks!

Consider starting with a CHIP-8 emulator. It's a perfect size for starting out and touches on a lot of important concepts you'll apply to the next emulator.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#112

Post by [deleted] »

simias wrote: post #27

I would add "build a toy regex engine" to the list. A couple of years ago I implemented a toy regex engine from scratch (building NFAs then turning them into DFAs). I thought it was an enlightening experience because it showed me that the core principles behind regular languages are fairly simple, although you could spend years optimizing and improving your implementation. How do you deal with unicode? How do you mod…

[deleted]

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#113

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I would add a basic feature-complete website which works on every mainstream browser starting with Mosaic.

It's much easier than it may seem, architecting it is interesting, and there is a lot of "last 10%" stuff which keeps it fun as long as you keep going.

In the demystifying area, it demystified HTML and JS history for me, forced me to use with a minimal toolkit, and taught me how to build "modern" JS features in ways which will not break browsers which don't know how to do them or have them disabled.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#114

Post by sverona »

nik_0_0 wrote: post #61
macintux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, adventofcode relies heavily on mathematical literacy that I suspect is neither all that common among developers nor all that important to most programming jobs. Plus there’s no good way within the context of the puzzles to find out what mathematical trick you need if you don’t already know; you need to go find a virtual water cooler. I may simply be biased because each year it reveals how little…

Interesting - I felt this way about Project Euler, which within the first few problems was exactly as you described - heavy mathematical literacy. I haven't gotten far into an Advent of Code since 2015 (~18 days), but have done the first 5 days of 2020; no mathematical literacy needed. For 2015, and 2020 so far - its mostly text parsing, data structure building and basic iteration/permutations.

Project Euler 1-50, maybe 1-100, is similar in difficulty level to Advent of Code, I'd say. After that it quickly starts to become about how much number theory you know.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#115

Post by 082349872349872 »

tracyhenry wrote: post #65

A great compilation: https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x

Building your own dogfood (if you use it daily, code a quick-and-dirty one) is a good way to learn that by holding the right end of the exponential, 80-20 solutions can easily be closer to 1-99+ in terms of manpower and code size.

(the flip side of 80-20 is: "all systems are fault tolerant, it's just that in most of them, the human is the component which tolerates the faults")

Of my IT daily drivers, I've done toy:

    - web browser / server
    - email client
    - document formatter
    - text editor
    - window manager
    - 3D / 2D graphic slicers/rasterizers w/ alphabetic fonts
    - shell
    - interpreters / compilers
    - operating system
    - VHDLish CPU
    - various data encodings (Hamming, MFM, etc.)
    - discrete transistor logic
(when I was just starting to program, I discovered the home directory of a colleague of my father's contained many experiments of this kind, and reading his work taught me C)

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#116

Post by hertzrat »

jameskilton wrote: post #2

I 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.

Speaking of games, I made a decent percent of one recently. It was 4 months of programming character controllers and an ability system, plus 3 weeks of content creation. It came together for a game jam submission (with permission to use the preexisting code).

Having to learn everything needed to write this... it was unbelievably educational from a software design point of view

If you enjoy horror or third person fantasy adventure games, give it a shot. If you do, please fill out the survey at the end so I can make it better for the next release

https://hertzrat.itch.io/a-few-nights-room-and-board

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#117

Post by nsomaru »

jackschultz wrote: post #100

Instead of a stock trading bot, go for daily fantasy sports contests. It can cover pretty much all parts of programming. Web scraping to gather data, databases for storing it, ML for analyzing, front and backend web dev to show the daily information and adjust. And instead of having to deal with trading regulations, contests can be really small and easy to enter. There are daily contests for 5 cents an entry, and you…

Which services would you recommend which are developer friendly?

Could you describe your approach? What type of information would you scrape?

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#118

Post by _huayra_ »

pjc50 wrote: post #17
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.

Wow this is wild! I never thought things would get so latency-sensitive that one would have to overlap request and response!

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#119

Post by stevekemp »

ashleyn wrote: post #7

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

I wrote a BASIC interpreter somewhat recently, in golang, and found it very nostalgic.

I've considered reworking it into a compiler, but never quite gotten around to it. Perhaps a challenge for the near year.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#120

Post by trustfundbaby »

What do folks think about implementing a web crawler that you can send to a website and it indexes every internal url on the site. I remember sitting down to write one 100 years ago now, and finding it to be much trickier than I thought it would be.
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