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More challenging projects every programmer should try

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Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#61

Post by nik_0_0 »

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…

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.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#62

Post by kamel3d »

gjvnq wrote: post #35
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 tried making a bitcoin trading bot and almost all of the money (about 10 bucks, not no big problem). My main mistake was using the historical trades instead of the historical offers as a testing dataset.

did it work at the end? I want to make a crypto trading bot seems simpler than stock one

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#63

Post by windowojji »

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 is very specifically a website that requires both math knowledge and programming ability. It's designed to expose people to difficult math concepts, while advent of code is mostly explicitly for programmers.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#64

Post by windowojji »

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 worked on a game boy emulator a while ago to learn C. I did pretty well and was able to run most games I came across just fine, but never got audio working...I just couldn't understand any of the stuff online about how it worked, and was unable to find any good resources that walked through how audio emulation in general worked, much less game boy's version.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#66

Post by quesera »

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.

Nice job slipping that in -- it fits perfectly!

And it brings back a fun memory:

I wrote MacTetris[1] when I was in high school. This made the computer lab a whole lot more popular during free periods than it had been previously.

Two interesting bugs that I recall:

* Mathematically rotating pieces around an axis was a terrible idea, but it produced some entertaining artifacts (and made placement much harder!). I replaced the math by precomputed rotation maps for each piece, which was much better. My first pass at the maps introduced a displacement bug, so you could spin the pieces counterclockwise and they would walk in the negative X direction.

* I got an angry bug report in the lunch room from a kid who had no reason to know my name. He was having a really great game, and then his score started decreasing with every piece. He felt like his record high score had been stolen from him, and he was upset! I asked "what was your score??". He said "I don't know, but by the time I noticed, it was over 30,000 but it was going DOWN!". Aha..[2] :)

[1] I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired on my appropriation of copyrights and trademarks.

[2] Back in the day, "int" meant "signed 16-bit integer", which is not the proper data type for a score counter.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#67

Post by etimberg »

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.

I haven't found this years aoc to be too mathematical either. It seems more parsing related, i.e. extract all this info from a line of text is the hardest part.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#70

Post by person_of_color »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #22

another one related to stock trading, but perhaps more interesting- build a simulator for a sport. both baseball and darts lend themselves to markov models, and are simple enough to simulate in some detail. with darts, you can get very close to as accurate as possible. baseball has more weird complications because of the rules. but its fun to do, and to compare to old games to see how well your model does.

have you made money?
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