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More challenging projects every programmer should try

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Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#161

Post by K0nserv »

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

It depends on what your goal is. If you believe that programming is a craft, akin to woodworking, then you'll soon realise you need to practice and work to put in the 10,000 hours to master it. Yes the list in the OP doesn't make for good ways to make money, but they are good for practicing your craft.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#162

Post by benibela »

Forge36 wrote: post #45
userbinator wrote: post #43

IMHO a text-based browser isn't exactly in the "challenging" category, as it basically amounts to stripping all the HTML tags out and doing some very simple transformations (like replacing 's with newlines.) Then again, one of the things I've been working on intermittently for the past few years is a graphical (CSS2+) browser, which is definitely in the challenging category. There are some other public efforts too: h…

It looks straightforward until you hit a couple of edge cases. Examples: test Test Test Test (From memory) What about: Test ? Per tests i did, "test " was expected however "test ” was seen as the plaintext version suggesting there's a list of valid tags which is filtering the behavior.

I have been stuck on such these edge cases for almost 15 years building my own HTML parser

It is always working on all the HTML files I have, but then people make new HTML files with other issues.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#163

Post by jmnicolas »

userbinator wrote: post #43

IMHO a text-based browser isn't exactly in the "challenging" category, as it basically amounts to stripping all the HTML tags out and doing some very simple transformations (like replacing 's with newlines.) Then again, one of the things I've been working on intermittently for the past few years is a graphical (CSS2+) browser, which is definitely in the challenging category. There are some other public efforts too: h…

> IMHO a text-based browser isn't exactly in the "challenging" category, as it basically amounts to [...]

All my projects start with me thinking like that, then many hours, days or months later me thinking "hey it was more complex than I thought".

For 2021 I want to build a personal finance app for myself. The usual me thinks it will take a couple months. The realist me wonders if it will be finished in this decade :)

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#164

Post by psibi »

schoen wrote: post #51
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…

I really enjoyed taking Ullman's Automata course on Coursera. I found it was great for better appreciating topics like * searching * implementation of automata in electronic circuits * challenges of formal specifications for things like protocols and grammars, as well as for verifying their correctness; implementation strategies for applying these specifications * computability and complexity * programming language t…

Somehow I found the course very dry (as compared to other coursera course like Dan Grossman's PL course).

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#165

Post by carl_dr »

thealig wrote: post #157
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #29

I wrote a raytracer in 1996, and then a year later used Intel's VTune to speed it up. Just removing unused "return" statements gave me 3x speed increase. Apparently Borland C/C++ wasn't very smart back then. A fun project I did after that was writing a AI frame language to do goal-stack problem solving, specifically with path finding. I connected it to the ray tracer and made movies of spheres having wars. (I used an…

That sounds fun. Do you have code for reference? Also I want to try out building a raytracer sometime as a hobby project, is it advisable to learn some 3d graphic concepts like WebGl and so?

Check Ray Tracing In One Weekend out : https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...

You can very quickly get something on the screen with it, although getting an intuition for how it works may take a little longer and some reading around the concepts it introduces. But it does let you focus on the maths rather than worrying about also learning how Web/OpenGL works too.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#166

Post by galoisgirl »

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

Depends. I'm doing Advent of Code in COBOL. I know those problems have been solved a long time ago.

I'm having fun, and that's reason enough.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#167

Post by hackart »

na85 wrote: post #122
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…

Not only that but adventofcode seems to leverage purposely-obtuse input formatting as an artificial difficulty enhancement. I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.

This is my first year attempting adventofcode. But doing other things mentioned in this discussion would have been better use of time.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#168

Post by tim333 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #21
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 in this industry. 2 more common issues: * Doing a latency-sensitive trade when you don't have good execution. It's easy to go wild in simulation and think you can flip in and out of positions. But if you're a retail trader (and in this context, by that I mean "not connected directly to the exchanges, at the minimum") * Not taking into account the impact of your own trading on markets. This is obviously impos…

>prices run away from you

I've found that stuff a lot. People forget that on the other end of the price is a thinking human or robo delegate thereof trying to outsmart you. It's really hard to say what will happen until you try it with real money / assets.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#169

Post by madflame991 »

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

I do not understand this reasoning and divide between student and post-student for lack of a better word. I have math/cs education, have worked both in startups and big companies, in the front-end, rendering and ai in the (“serious”) game industry. I have always worked on exactly these sort of educational projects on my own and it’s a complete joy: git client from scratch - yep, useless, but extremely educational, jit for befunge - same, etc etc. I am extremely happy people still engage and do “useless”stuff and HN is for me a big inspiration in that sense.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#170

Post by Biganon »

macintux wrote: post #44
timvisee wrote: post #30

Fantastic list! By the way, adventofcode.com is currently ongoing. Though the challenges are easy compared to the projects in this list, I highly recommend it. It covers problems you might face in big projects. With these small puzzles it's easy to experiment. It prepares you for bigger things.

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…

I strongly disagree. I know nothing about math, yet I'm able to solve almost all the puzzles. The only time this year I was stuck because of math was a puzzle that required knowing about the Chinese remainders theorem, and even then, I've seen users solve the problem with their own intuitive method (which was obviously not as efficient as the theorem, but valid nonetheless).
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