Challenging projects every programmer should try

http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/challengingprojects.html

by azhenley • 7 years ago

911 282 7 years ago

web.eecs.utk.edu

azhenley8• 7 years ago

If anyone has any other good ideas, please let me know. I'll make a list of them at the end of the article and provide credit.

wefarrell• 7 years ago

MS paint clone.

azhenley8• 7 years ago

I've never tried but I can see that being really fun. Someone else sent me an email suggesting a vector graphics editor. I'll add both, thanks!

chupa-chups• 7 years ago

You'll have to establish an MVP program on top of the clone:

https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/430478

</fun>

dfox3• 7 years ago

My suggestions:

Implement basic widget toolkit, making something that essentially works is simple (regardless whether you implement in on top of dumb framebuffer, existing display server like X11/WinAPI or even on top of HTML). But there are lots of nuanced details that you will probably learn along the way, some of them overlap the text editor problem, then there are things like not opening windows/popup menus outside the display area (there are widely used toolkits that get this wrong even for the simplest “select box on bottom of the screen” case), clipping, handling scrolling (both detecting if something is too large and should be scrollable and actually implementing scrolling efficiently) and last but not least designing the API to be both powerful and simple to use.

Simple transactional database that really has ACID semantics. Locking, BTrees, journaling, isolation levels, how to actually store all that in files.

Toy unix block filesystem (there can be some overlap with previous point and for journaling design it might be better to start with the FS case). Recommended reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309686

And, which is maybe somehow motivated by doing this mostly pointless thing as long abandoned pet project, and thus maybe slightly nonsencial: implement AFS-like “distributed” filesystem. The interesting part there lies in RPC and authentication mechanisms, not in doing some kind of distributed consensus (thats why “AFS-like”, as AFS has single master server for each volume)

And at last, although the theme is somewhat different: Implement a tool that given a path to unix file prints a list of users who have access to the file and what kind of access they have. This sounds like simple tool, but is surprisingly non-trivial even without takong ACLs into account. (This is not from me, but I read this in some similar list ~15 years ago, IIRC by Andrew Tridgell)

umvi• 7 years ago

It's fun trying to recreate GNU coreutils. Stuff like grep.

lawn• 7 years ago

An emulator of something is a pretty good idea I think.

evmar• 7 years ago

My goto project is a terminal emulator, for reasons I went into here: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2016/07/terminal-emulator... (summary: it touches a surprising breadth of details!)

stevewilhelm• 7 years ago

- A load balancer module that accepts generic worker functions.

- A service that can take a real-time timestamped data and generate an internalized time series. For example returns a first, last, high, low, and average value at fifteen second intervals.

- A mechanism for serializing structured data. Something like Google Protobuf.

- A chart widget optimized to display and navigate date based content.

bhl• 7 years ago

A lightweight clone of git: implement basic commands such as log, merge, commit, fork.

sigjuice• 7 years ago

What is the “fork” command? I don’t see it here https://git-scm.com/docs

pvg• 7 years ago

Are you familiar with Etudes for Programmers? There's a bit of overlap with your list and it's also an interesting look back at what someone thought programmers ought to try their hands at a few decades ago.

akamoonknight• 7 years ago

One professional project that really changed some of the ways that I thought about programming was writing a PCIe Linux driver. Learning how the kernel lays out data structures and how they provide callbacks and passing data back to the 'user' was really just different than I had thought about things before. Definitely a lot of pitfalls, but lots of learning.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

a simple paint program in assembly

bwiggs• 7 years ago

Port Scanner/nmap clone - This project is much simpler than the others, but is more approachable. It's a great project to implement when picking up a new language. If it's your first time writing one, it forces you to learn a bit about networking and concurrency if you want it to scan quickly.

mac_was• 7 years ago

Great idea for projects!

thrower1232• 7 years ago

Either a raytracer or a software rasterizer. Or both.

azhenley8• 7 years ago

I almost added raytracer! I'll add it to the end with some other community suggested projects. Thanks for the suggestion.

nlh• 7 years ago

Seconded! Raytracer is phenominal, especially if you do it “purely” (no GPU/OpenGL/etc.).

It’s relatively straightforward and the satisfaction of seeing even a basic shaded sphere that you literally created from scratch in code by writing pixels to a bitmap file is awesome. I did this about a year ago and it was still one of the most fun/educational projects I’ve ever done.

Lerc• 7 years ago

Raytracer was the thing that sprang to mind for me.

Currently the only two I have left to do on the list are the Basic compiler and the spreadsheet. I plan to do the compiler quite soon, once the emulator IDE is nice enough. If I decide to do a Basic without line numbers I'll probably be doing another text editor as well.

Not sure if I could bring myself to write a spreadsheet. I feel queasy just looking at them.

aklemm• 7 years ago

Perhaps something web-based--perhaps collaborative or real-time--and get exposure to sessions, database work, networking, APIs, and the tooling ecosystem, etc.

merolish• 7 years ago

Seconded, a minimal full-stack system like a messaging service could go in many directions depending on your interests.

userbinator5• 7 years ago

The biggest challenge is figuring out how to store the text document in memory. My first thought was to use an array, but that has horrible performance if the user inserts text anywhere other than the end of the document.

The counter-argument to that is that processors are ridiculously fast in human timescales --- copying memory at gigabytes per second --- so unless you're focusing your use-case on editing correspondingly huge files, there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array. Even when DOS machines with <640K of memory and memcpy() speeds in the low MB/s were the norm, people edited text files of similar sizes, with editors that used a single array buffer, and for that purpose they weren't noticeably slower than ones today.

My ideas for challenging projects are a little less open-ended, so they exercise different set of skills: being able to implement a specification correctly and efficiently.

    - TTF renderer
    - GIF or JPEG en/decoder
    - Video decoder (start with H.261)

IMHO being able to consume existing content with code you wrote is very rewarding.

tgv2• 7 years ago

there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array

Ugh. That's just offensive.

yaantc• 7 years ago

Not really, it's a commonly used scheme. Read on gap buffers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_buffer

It's really an array with a gap at the cursor location. Used by emacs and others for decades.

symplee• 7 years ago

Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

> A rope, or cord, is a data structure composed of smaller strings that is used to efficiently store and manipulate a very long string. For example, a text editing program may use a rope to represent the text being edited, so that operations such as insertion, deletion, and random access can be done efficiently.

markus_zhang3• 7 years ago

I just read from somewhere that VSCode uses a "piece tree" for code strings. Damn couldn't find the link...

dfox3• 7 years ago

IIRC many DOS-era editors used an array/list of line buffers. Which to me seems like good middle ground solution. Certainly for the todays typical usecase when you care about performance, ie. editing >100MB text data file by hand, which is giant pain in emacs because the gap buffer simply is not good structure for doing few simple edits across three places 10MBs away (as you spend most of the time moving the gap around, while touching essentially all of the memory)

jstimpfle6• 7 years ago

Do you know of any reason why the gap buffer couldn't be easily replaced by a proper rope?

phkahler2• 7 years ago

I dont see any problem with an array. Make it huge so you only have to reallocate every megabyte or so. Keep track of the document length and only move as much as needed. Your processor can do this every character faster than you can type. No need for fancy data structures, and trivial to load and save files. The interesting part then becomes formatting for the display.

jstimpfle6• 7 years ago

Try a 100MB file.

Laakeri2• 7 years ago

Imagine inserting text in the middle of 1GB file. Moving 500MB of data will definitely take longer than 18ms, and thus will cause at least some visible lag.

aliceryhl• 7 years ago

Last I looked into writing a JPEG en/decoder, I ran into the issue that I was unable to find a specification not behind a $800 paywall.

Jasper_• 7 years ago

Here you go:

https://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/itu-t81.pdf

https://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/jfif3.pdf

I'll also link Cristi Cuturicu's "A note about the JPEG decoding algorithm", which is where I started my decoder implementation from, and it was indeed a ton of fun.

http://www.opennet.ru/docs/formats/jpeg.txt

jacquesm• 7 years ago

The JPEG reference source code is pretty readable.

caconym_2• 7 years ago

I don't edit really huge files that often (maybe a couple of times a week), but when I do I want to be able to use the same editor I use for everything else. A really great text editor is fast and flexible and powerful regardless of the size of the file you're trying to edit.

alecmg• 7 years ago

Thats one issue I have with these proposed programming tasks.

You are not going to write a really great text editor as a learning exercise. It has been done by better programmers who had better overview of the problems and over thousands man hours.

This automatically means the task is as useless as a gameboy emulator or basic compiler. The underlying "Things to learn" points are good, but tasks themselves are not.

dnautics• 7 years ago

so unless you're focusing your use-case on editing correspondingly huge files, there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array.

I think the other major corner case is when you need concurrent, distributed editing (although that's not popular or anything these days), in which case an array is a very poor datastructure.

retrovm• 7 years ago

"no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array"

That's our industry in a nutshell. Our computers, instead of becoming more capable over time, can barely keep pace with the increasing naivety of our programmers.

Denzel• 7 years ago

Yes, this is engineering in a nutshell: determining a course of action within a set of constraints that meets your objectives. Where constraints can be time, cost, physical limitations (processor speed, memory size, disk space), etc; and objectives can be functional (user can edit files), nonfunctional (user can edit large files in < X seconds, energy usage), personal learning, or any number of other requirements.

The GP offered a valid decision point to consider based upon what an engineer is solving for. I don’t think he said that an array was the solution he’d ship in a production text editor to millions of end-users.

Engineering is hardly naive. :)

OkGoDoIt• 7 years ago

Are you suggesting that it’s bad to use the simple uncomplicated approach because it’s inefficient, or that it’s bad to add layers upon layers of complexity which end up bringing modern computers to their knees?

Personally I’m in the latter camp. There’s so many layers of abstraction nowadays which each in theory make programming better/safer/easier which in practice end up creating an incredibly inefficient mess.

kortilla• 7 years ago

Yet if you read the rest of the comment you would realize this specific use-case (editing text) was done fine with a single array buffer when computers had less than 1mb of memory to work with.

This is a perfect example of when it’s stupid to keep optimizing.

prox2• 7 years ago

I use to read the blog on virtualdub.org (video capture and processing) and enjoy his rants on bundled library bloat. Virtualdub was small in footprint and great to use. So do programmers become reliant on scaffolding too much, or is it a necessity as you learn?

jstummbillig• 7 years ago

In webdev, increasingly often, the expectation is that programmers not only to do the backend, but also the database management, the frontend (which used to be graphic design, css/html, and js, separately) and everything devops.

Outside of webdev, Unity springs to mind, as another great example of this: The stuff you can do as a single game developer is mind boggling, or at least used to be, until indie devs everywhere started boggling our minds on a daily basis and thus raising the standard of what consumers expect an indie game to be.

This is, of course, not possible because within 50 years humans evolved to be a lot better or smarter or faster than their predecessors. It is made possible through more flexible higher level tooling, that you don't have to understand the inner workings of to take advantage of, and more abundant computing resources, that in tandem, enable work that will be in the "good enough" territory for most use cases.

This is also not a choice that programmers as individuals or even a group make. It's a choice that the market makes.

There is nothing naive about it. Naive is assuming, it would be any other way.

Frost1x• 7 years ago

People jump for complex and overly optimized solutions too quickly, IMHO. From a conceptual perspective, I enjoy these sort of challenges but that's where it ends.

For product demands where deadlines are constantly unrealistic, underfunded, underscoped and demands are ever changing, I'm a fan of providing the simplest conceptual solution to the task at hand and not focusing on developing complex abstractions and optimizations too early.

From my experience, that time is typically wasted until functionality is zeroed in and real money is available to pay for the work, as the early complex abstractions typically fail to meet pace with demands and the optimizations break when ever changing requirements.. change. That's just my experience, YMMV.

busterarm4• 7 years ago

Raise your hand if just running your web browser has pegged your top-end, multiprocessor, high-mem system in the last month. Both Firefox and Chrome have for me.

mpweiher2• 7 years ago

I wish that were our industry. Instead, we make things super complicated and make them slower at the same time.

Let's take the text editor example. Let's say we use it to edit a large document. Is Moby Dick large enough? It's around a megabyte of (pure) text. Let's figure out a persistence solution. How about "we save the entire text to disk"? So a megabyte to disk. My laptop's SSD does (large) writes at 2GB/s. So the ultra simple solution could save the entire text around 2000 times per second.

That's a lot faster than I can type.

namirez3• 7 years ago

there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array.

I think you are misunderstood about the concept an array. An array has 1) an interface that is easy to use. On the other hand, by definition, an array is 2) contiguous in memory. Property 1 is good but 2 can cause problems. I think you want only 1.

The solution is to create a data type that has the interface of an array but a different implementation under the hood. You can have a linked-list of arrays, a tree of strings, etc.

prox2• 7 years ago

I wonder what a text editor made by HN would be like, everyone is already thinking up strategies :)

onion2k• 7 years ago

Whether an array is contiguous in memory depends on the language (and the specific implementation of that language). JavaScript uses hash tables for its arrays which are really objects.

HereBeBeasties• 7 years ago

I think the original commenter knows full well what an array is.

Vague justifications like "can cause problems" is probably exactly what he's referring to, in fact - people who know that inserting elements into an array is "slow" and end up making large and complex code as a result. Yes, it's O(N) on the length of your code, but the point is that for a couple of megs of text, O(N) is perfectly acceptable.

At least on a desktop, that'll fit in L3 cache which these days is around 175GB/sec. Or to put it another way, inserting that single char can probably be done at around 40,000 times per second. Which is faster than I can type, at any rate.

bryal• 7 years ago

there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array

Yeah, good luck enabling line numbers in such an editor.

In Emacs, which uses a gap-buffer for storing text, line numbers have had notoriously slow. It's gotten a bit better lately, but suffice to say, a naïve flat array / gap-buffer approach is not good enough for some relatively common scenarios even on modern hardware.

nine_k• 7 years ago

But line numbers are trivial to update when a gap buffer needs a move.

A list of strings is more elegant, of course, where only the line being edited becomes a gap buffer. It taxes the allocator a bit more, though, which might be a concern on computers of the time when Emacs was born.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

That's a problem to deal with when/if you need to add line numbers. Not a minute before that!

jstimpfle6• 7 years ago

I don't think there should be a problem with line numbers. I would make two helper arrays containing the indices of the new-line characters, corresponding to the two gap buffer text arrays (new-line positions are sorted ascending for the first array, descending for the second array).

Speaking as someone who's gone all the way from implementing a Red-black tree to making a rope data structure using the RB tree, to making a text editor that can edit almost arbitrarily large text files (dozens of gigabytes) without user-perceivable latency ;-)

userbinator5• 7 years ago

I suspect that slowness is due to something else; remember that computers these days can execute a few billion instructions per second.

I've written code to do word wrapping, and it was surprising how fast it was. Line numbers are similarly complex.

xxs2• 7 years ago

TIF and GIF are trivial compared to JPEG and H.261, saying that having implemented LZW and GIF (in assembly for 8086) as teenager

mwfunk• 7 years ago

For TIFF (and most formats) that's heavily dependent on if you're talking about implementing a reader or a writer for the format. TIFF readers need to handle JPEG streams, so in that sense implementing a general purpose TIFF reader is a superset of implementing a general purpose JPEG reader.

On the other hand, TIFF writers can (very conveniently!) be almost as simple as you want, including no compression at all, just blobs of raw pixel values, and a smattering of tags for width, height, pixel format, and that's it. The only thing simpler to output IMO would be uncompressed ASCII formats like XPM.

So in that sense you're correct- the simplest possible JPEG writer is much more complicated than the simplest possible TIFF writer, but TIFF in general is extensible to a fault (arguably), in the sense that the number of possible combinations of pixel and metadata encodings you have to prepare yourself for when opening arbitrary .tif files are far greater than when opening arbitrary .jpg files, including JPEGs within TIFFs.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Spec implementation is indeed very valuable. But in your cases these are data oriented problems. I'd add some systemic cases: networking, security..

my 2 cents

audiometry• 7 years ago

Not sure about Gb of throughout makes editor memory representations unimportant. Just this week my friend said he kill emacs with a few-MB text file. I was astonished that a software of that esteem would struggle with that.

ses1984• 7 years ago

It's unlikely plain emacs struggled with that file.

BeetleB2• 7 years ago

In my first job I would routinely open 10-20 MB files in Emacs. It handled it just fine. I mean, it gives a warning that this is considered big, but I ignored it.

Now if you open a large text file in something other than text mode, it could bring it to its knees depending on the mode. As an example, opening an XML file in the nXML mode is quite expensive, because nXML mode is powerful and utilizes your XML structure. I just tried a 12 MB XML file and told it to go to the end of the file. It's taking Emacs forever to do it (easily over 30s). But if I switch to text mode for that same file, it handles it just fine.

I just tried an 800 MB text file. It handled it fine.

The one thing where you can easily get in trouble: Long lines. Emacs cannot handle long lines well. Kinda sad.

lodi• 7 years ago

Try `emacs -nw -q` for a stock experience. That should have no problem with any reasonable text file.

froh• 7 years ago

Umm the dos 640k were paged, non contiguous. Additionally, smoothly editing larger texts back then required some clever linked lists of blocks to give a truly instantaneous editing experience for inserting text at the beginning of a large text. Those were the 286/386 days.

Today you have fancy rendering, and an instantaneous editing experience for that reason again suggests a more sophisticated data structure for the editor.

Which all text editors have, when you look inside vi/emacs/nano/whatever...

scarface744• 7 years ago

The counter-argument to that is that processors are ridiculously fast in human timescales

Until you actually have to implement your algorithm on a mobile device that is both memory, and power constrained and that doesn’t have a swap file. The OS will either lol your program for being too memory or power inefficient, kill another program running in the background (not a great user experience) and/or force the use of the high power cores using unnecessary battery life when a more efficient algorithm could have used the lower power cores.

Attitudes like this also explains why developers don’t think twice about delivering battery consuming Electron apps.

tripzilch9• 7 years ago

But did you try editing a multi megabyte file with that method? Cause I have seen enough editors struggle with big files (especially if the file is a single line and you're going through it with word-wrap on), that I think the basic straight-forward approach already isn't sufficient on such workloads.

from the article:

Luckily, there are some nice data structures to learn to solve this.

You could have also learned a new data structure!

I mean, it should be obvious that "this thing that the cursor does when moving lines" isn't the big takeaway from this challenge. It's almost cute that the author never noticed it (as a programmer), because I actually use that behaviour to navigate code sometimes. Who hasn't done a quick arrow-left/right to make the cursor lose its memory of which column it used to be on?

Even when DOS machines with <640K of memory and memcpy() speeds in the low MB/s were the norm, people edited text files of similar sizes, with editors that used a single array buffer, and for that purpose they weren't noticeably slower than ones today.

No way. Every reasonably performant text editor in those days used special data structures and not just an array. Imagine having to copy the entire buffer on each key press (so, when inserting at the start of the file). Believe me, on a 640K DOS machine you'll feel that.

This isn't new stuff, I learned about these data structures in uni -- except I don't remember them because back then I was young and arrogant and didn't think you'd need these fancy data structures for something as simple as an editor :) :)

... but if you never tried to write one, it's hard to see in what ways these editors are not as easy as you think.

bochoh• 7 years ago

I'd probably do a doubly linked list for the test document. Then you're looking at O(1) for operations I think.

zabzonk• 7 years ago

Not for searching. Linked lists are fine if you are at the point where you need to do an operation, but getting to that point can be expensive.

DonaldFisk• 7 years ago

I'd strongly recommend using a gap buffer for storing the text in while it's being edited, and within reason I wouldn't worry too much about runtime performance, as any reasonable solution should be able to keep up with a user typing.

bogdanoff_22• 7 years ago

how do you generate a dynamic number of enemies? The factory pattern helps a lot.

Why?

The factory pattern is about adding logic and state to the creation of objects. What's wrong with creating enemies using their usual constructors and dumping them into a resizable array?

jayd16• 7 years ago

You use a factory when you have code that needs to create something but shouldn't determine the details of their creation. If you want to create enemies from multiple places (seems common) you don't want to have to refactor every place when you change something about the creation or pooling.

bogdanoff_22• 7 years ago

Yes, if you determine that creating your objects requires passing in state or using some logic that you don't want to put in the constructor, then using a factory or factory function makes sense. However that has nothing to do with creating a dynamic number of enemies.

Object pooling is a good point actually.

thrower1232• 7 years ago

It does make it a lot easier to hide implementation details down the road, for instance if you start using object pooling.

deepnotderp2• 7 years ago

A neural network from scratch?

cameronfraser• 7 years ago

I thought about saying this as well, but this isn't really a challenging programming assignment. It's a challenging math assignment, but once you know the math the programming is very easy (assuming using a numerical library that supports vectorization)

deepnotderp2• 7 years ago

That's fair, and you're right about that. I'd still highly recommend anyone interested in ML to implement their favorite algorithms from scratch.

gmenegatti• 7 years ago

IMHO I think databases could be added to the list.

It’s one of the most complex system one can develop and you end up learning about multiple areas, such as OS, compilers, distributed systems, data structures, parallelism etc.

pacaro• 7 years ago

This. Just implementing a persistent key value store with b-trees is a great jumping off point

This is a rabbit hole that goes as deep as you want it, which has both positives and negatives of course

krn• 7 years ago

It’s one of the most complex system one can develop

The same could probably be said about the internal combustion engine, but it might soon be replaced by electric batteries, which provide a much more elegant solution.

I believe that "unbundled" databases, such as Crux[1], can become the electric batteries of the database world by making a lot of the current complexity irrelevant.

[1] https://opencrux.com/

detaro3• 7 years ago

What makes crux's internals less complicated than a more conventional database?

mamcx2• 7 years ago

Whoa! somebody actually try to implement the log as the central component of a db!

After read https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... I wondered about that. I think that make the log first class and "plug" relational tables (optionally) will make a amazing database engine. In short, you PERSIST your commands:

    POST /City ..
    PUT /City ..
    DELETE /City ..

and put listeners that decide if persist or not the commands, this allow to do:

POST /SendMail (to:...)

and have the flexibility to bundle the domain logic on top of the data logic in a single lang. This is my long term goal..

mamcx2• 7 years ago

I'm doing a relational lang(http://tablam.org), that could be considered to be a in memory kind of db.

Is certainly challenging.

Just look at joins. You have (at least) 2 nested loop joins algos, then sorted and hash joins, and then you have cross and left, right, inner and outers. All of them with small subtle tricks to make it performant (in theory: You can build all on top of CROSS. But! That will be very wastefull very fast!)

daxfohl• 7 years ago

The caveat there is you can write up a fairly simple nosql database in an afternoon. What I like about the other projects is that the barrier to even a minimal thing is a bit higher. I think that leads to more opportunity to work your creative muscles.

Though if you add some constraints like it must have jdbc compatability then that becomes interesting.

StillBored• 7 years ago

The problem with writing a database, and maybe a few other of these, is that given the enormous compute/io capabilities of a modern machine, its quite possible to implement it completely wrong and never really know.

AKA, a toy database might be enough to handle some simple storage/retrieval problems but be full of hidden O(n^2) or higher logic which would fall down hard with even fairly simple usage in the "real world".

Reminds me of my own text editor, written in Applesoft basic when I was in middle school. It worked for its intended purpose (editing small assembly files), but was really quite terrible all things considered. I remember it being quite slow to save/restore, and it was only really capable of editing files of a few hundred lines before it started breaking BASICs memory allocation schemes. AKA, I didn't really learn any of the datastructure finesse needed to implement a "real" text editor with line wrap/etc.

Worse I remember trying to read the code a few years later, and while it fit on two printed pages, it was 100% unreadable.

(for those that don't know, applesoft's speed was influenced by "formatting" if you will. It encouraged line number usage only really for control flow, plus the long list of call/peek/poke magic numbers required a handy cheat sheet of what each address did)

chooseaname• 7 years ago

I would like to add that a good project is to fix some bugs or add some feature to a project like, say, GNU Octave; especially for new developers. It really expands your mind as a new developer learning how to read code and understand where to make changes and add features.

azhenley8• 7 years ago

I agree! I'll be teaching a graduate-level SE course in the future and I intend on making contributions to open source projects a requirement.

closeparen2• 7 years ago

I sat around with a desire to “make an open source contribution” for years. Followed the advice about looking through bug trackers for tractable issues. Never could make heads or tails of a project.

Then at work I become an ambitious user of a relatively immature open source platform. As a power user, I finally had real motivation to fix specific defects, and a good enough mental map to get it done. It came naturally.

conistonwater• 7 years ago

Won't this mean that those projects' maintainers will suddenly get a random influx of half-baked pull requests, which are somehow tied to a grade? This sounds a little too close to the "term papers must be good enough to be submitted to conferences" anti-pattern.

chobeat3• 7 years ago

Have you considered that suggesting people to make copies of copies of copies for the sake of a technical challenge instead of tackling real world problems (even as beginners) might fuel the endless waste of energy that programmers collectively pour into developing useless stuff for their own amusement? In a world where pro-bono software development is very scarce, is this what we want to teach to beginners?

kbenson• 7 years ago

Copying others is a tried and true way of increasing your abilities. Painters don't just start out as masters, they often spend years copying other styles until they find what like themselves. There's only so much the human mind will come up with on its own, being presented with new problems in new domains, and how other people addressed them is one way of increasing ability.

Take the master of any domain, and their past is likely littered with experiments and copies of things that already exist, either because they thought they could do it better or because they wanted to understand that topic better.

chobeat3• 7 years ago

Fine, I'm questioning the idea that the goal should be to maximize an hypotethical "programming skill", something that I'm not sure it even exist, I can only see adherence to different subjective definitions of "clean", "orthogonal" or "simple". What's the point of writing aesthetically pleasing software if it sits unused on Github? If you're lucky you can aim at replacing some old tool doing exactly the same thing with the only added value of satisfying the endless desire for novelty of other programmers. Innovations in software are very rare and almost never come from trial and error but most often from academic research. Why should this endless machine of waste reproduce itself over and over?

esotericn5• 7 years ago

the endless waste of energy that programmers collectively pour into developing useless stuff for their own amusement

I don't know about you, but that's pretty close to my definition of life itself.

You are a waste. I am a waste. Do what you find fun, whilst causing the least pain to others in the process. These look like fun projects to me.

gombosg2• 7 years ago

Good question - where do "learning exercises" end and "useless amusement projects" start?

If I want to learn a new language I might do some fun exercises or hit an online course or a book, both of which contain lots of "useless" toy examples and exercises.

For a high school student this may be a hello world, for a CS professor this can be a small OS.

chobeat3• 7 years ago

I believe the "learning exercises" are over when you are able to develop solid real world software with the skills you have but you decided to keep expanding "horizontally" your skillset out of desire for novelty, desire for visibility or just fear of missing out. We all know people with 10 years of working experience that start new libraries to deal with a super-niche engineering problem already solved by 5 other libraries just to say "I made this and it went around" or "All the other libraries suck because they are built on different opinions than mine". Obviously 99% of these projects die very early just to be followed by a new one.

randomidiot6663• 7 years ago

This is for self education as much as self amusement. Have you never done an assignment at school/college/university?

dang• 7 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

artfulhippo• 7 years ago

For me, it's hard to learn by making useless things. Without any impact for users, I have no motivation to make correct design decisions.

annnoo• 7 years ago

It differs from person to person I guess. For me it is more about learning and understanding stuff. It motivates me more than doing my day to day job, because I encounter completely different domains and problems :)

randomidiot6663• 7 years ago

Then make something useful, at least for yourself. A tool that helps your productivity. An emulator that you will actually play games on.

shantly• 7 years ago

1000% the same. I often get motivated to mess around with or learn something for the sake of it, but have a very hard time choosing something to get motivated to mess around with or learn about.

Give me someone who needs me to build something I don't already know how to build, though, and I will figure that shit out.

I've been lucky that this has worked out well for me so far, but it means I need to always try to get on projects with unfamiliar things or take new jobs involving unfamiliar things, or I'll have a really hard time expanding my skillset.

Oh, and school sucked.

barbs• 7 years ago

I totally agree. I personally will never work on any of these things unless the end result is being used, either by myself or someone else. Or I'm getting paid for it. Spending all that time working on something that ultimately reinvents the wheel and just ends up gathering dust in a github repo just feels so pointless to me.

No offence if you enjoy this sort of thing though, of course. Just not my bag.

azhenley8• 7 years ago

:( These are the projects that I look forward to though. Not having anyone to please is a very nice break. I find that to be the opposite of useless.

ronilan5• 7 years ago

If you ever wondered how the tech interview process got to where it is, here is live example (of one possible explanation) - look at the comments, gleefully adding more and more stuff.

So.

1. “Every programmer” is a matter of speaking. Obviously not every programer should try any of. Author I believe knows that.

2. If you are not a programmer you don’t add to the list. Period. You wouldn’t be adding to the list of “drills any dentist should try”, right? So why here?

3. If you are a programmer, and have not tried all of the above why are you adding more? Yah, I know, you once did a challenging project that is not on the list. So did I. “Doesn’t make me Madonna, never will”.

Now what if you are a programmer and you’ve done all on the list, with or without substitution (like Snake might be equal Space Invaders)?

In which case you’d have at least 6 repos to share with the world, and if you can implement Tic-tac-toe live, you might get to the next round of interviews.

esotericn5• 7 years ago

'Every programmer should tackle these at some point before they die' =/= 'every programmer should have done this before they interview for a job'.

ronilan5• 7 years ago

Your assertion is true but you missed the point. Completely.

Let me clarify - the process by which commenters gleefully (damn that’s a nice word) add things to the list is illustrative of how things got added to the interview process. No one ever said something (or anything) should be done before interview.

Now as for “tackling before you die”.

If your name is Bobby Wagner, than by all means, tackle, it’s your job, but please do not die.

If you are programmer, you are not obliged to neither.

johnfn• 7 years ago

I don’t understand where all this negativity comes from. The OP is just sharing some projects they found particularly fun. It’d be like a hiker saying “every hiker should climb the Stanford dish”. Nothing wrong with that, they’d just be sharing something that they found particularly gratifying.

detaro3• 7 years ago

People dislike the every X should framing, because it's also often used in a negative way ("you're not a real X if you haven't", "you should invest lots of time to do these extra things", ...).

If it's "a list of projects that were particularly fun" that would be great title.

jsmolka• 7 years ago

Writing an emulator is a great project indeed. I've been working on my GBA emulator for almost a year now and I learned so many different things about hardware, assembly programming and video output.

carapace• 7 years ago

Implement Forth, Lisp, and Prolog. (For extra fun write your Lisp in Forth and then your Prolog in Lisp...)

skizm• 7 years ago

A lot of these things involve graphics. Every time I try doing my own graphics (not using an engine like unreal/unity) I have trouble even getting a triangle to show up on screen. There is nearly always something that doesn’t work like the tutorial says it should and that isn’t common enough to come up when I google the error. In C/c++ I can never get the toolchain working correctly and compiling step one never works even when I pull the authors project exactly. Last time I tried pygame it turns out it like just doesn’t work on Macs or something? None of the examples worked, just got blank boxes. Couldn’t make it past the first few steps in lazyfoo’s tutorial, even unreal engine’s tutorials are constantly being outdated due to short release cycles, although I’ve had the most success with unreal.

I’m not sure if I’m just thick or something, but any project that involves low-ish level graphics I shy away from because I’ve had so much trouble in the past.

pjc50• 7 years ago

It might be genuinely easier to do it in emulated MSDOS QBASIC or BBC BASIC.

progman32• 7 years ago

Check out QB64. Modern implementation of quickbasic. Looks, behaves, and feels like the original if you want it to.

calaphos• 7 years ago

I image most of these 'low level' approaches involve OpenGL which seems to be a bit troublesome on macOS. I can recommend to have a look at webGL, it's basically a limited openGL subset that is called from Javascript. Really easy to get started as it involves no dependencies, compilers, etc. except for (basically any) webbrowser.

Used it for my first graphics related programming project. Was lots of fun and I learned a lot.

curtainvase• 7 years ago

all my attempts at learning graphical programming consisted of getting about 3 tutorials in and then getting to a point where they just didnt work anymore

eventually I ended up learning via the HTML5 canvas element and WebGL, which gets rid of the problem of having having a different setup to the author

earenndil• 7 years ago

Why not write a terminal app? Everything except for the game emulator can be usefully done inside the terminal, which is pretty easy to get up-and-running with (and provides its own unique set of design constraints).

slx26• 7 years ago

don't worry, it's not you alone.

openGL is only a specification. and there are many openGL versions. and drivers have different implementations. and modern openGL uses shaders. which use another language, GLSL, which also has different versions. and openGL needs a context to draw on. each OS has different display servers to create those contexts and windows. here we also have to differentiate protocols and actual implementations. and then you might want to write openGL in a certain language different from C/C++. now choose a library or two or five, where each one will deal with one or two or twenty of those issues, plus other things like keyboard and mouse input, etc.

so, either you follow config instructions very closely and repeat until you find one that works, or you try to start understanding all this, get very annoyed and throw your computer through the real window.

AlexeyBrin• 7 years ago

Last time I tried pygame it turns out it like just doesn’t work on Macs or something? None of the examples worked, just got blank boxes

PyGame seems to work if you install the official Python 3 binary from python.org and install PyGame with the pip package manager included with the Python installation. (Last time I've checked Conda Python and the version from Homebrew have some problems when installing PyGame.)

AdrianB1• 7 years ago

The list is fine, the title is misleading: these are not projects every programmer should try, only the ones that want a more serious challenge than their usual. For many programmers these challenges are too difficult and a complete waste of time, as a certain psychologist was saying IQ is something you cannot train and IQ is generally telling how fast you can learn new things; with an IQ that is not enough, that time goes to infinite. Programming is now accessible to so many people and programmers are so diverse, enough have an IQ low enough to contradict the title.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 years ago

These aren't bad. They are, by no means, a definitive list. If you can do all of these, good stuff; but there's plenty more where they came from.

To be honest, the very first professional project I ever did (in 1987), was a complete embedded OS.

In 1983, I wrote a Space Invaders game on my VIC-20, in Machine Code. In those days, you had to use characters to represent aliens, so I made up my own font.

I've done a number of text editors over the last 30-some years. Nowadays, most operating system frameworks have 99% of a full-featured text editor built in, and you can do it with a few calls to system resources.

I haven't written any real compilers (haven't ever felt the need), but I have done a ton of parsers and whatnot.

amerine• 7 years ago

What are you referring to when you say “operating system frameworks”?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 years ago

UIKit, AppKit, Windows SDK, Cocoa, Android SDK, ChromeOS, etc.

In AppKit, you can do a pretty full-featured text editor as a "Hello World" project.

master_yoda_12• 7 years ago

Most of the undergrads do these projects if they do computer science Text editor 2D game - Space Invaders Compiler - Tiny BASIC Mini operating system

So the author must be talking about non programmers

azhenley8• 7 years ago

Do you have evidence for that?

I asked students in my undergrad course if they had tried these. The only one they had was the operating system. I took two different operating system courses when I was a student and never actually implemented one.

master_yoda_12• 7 years ago

that is the problem. your undergrad program is not challenging enough. you should repeat your undergrad.

wool_gather3• 7 years ago

Kind of related, there's this list of "Build Your Own $FOO" (that I'm pretty sure I learned about here on HN originally :) https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x

- Build Your Own Text Editor

- Build Your Own Shell

- Build Your Own Git (!)

etc.

Comes complete with the Feynman quote "What I cannot create, I do not understand".

winrid• 7 years ago

Wasn't the quote, what I cannot explain I do not understand?

wool_gather3• 7 years ago

Hah, yes, good point, I think you're correct about that.

The repo has an adaptation of the quote, then. :)

barrkel• 7 years ago

Write a database. Depending on what angle you take, it can look like a compiler (SQL parsing, predicate evaluation, optimizing for index usage), OS (file systems for in-place updates of complex data structures, and scheduling with lock dependencies), distributed systems (consistency and availability tradeoffs across machines, with possible partitions).

And then there's the whole mental model of relational algebra and stream processing of queries.

It'll give new appreciation for existing databases and what they can and can't do for you.

Transfinity• 7 years ago

One of my favorite courses in college was basically this. I learned so much about filesystems, data structures and concurrency that has been useful in my career!

doggydogs94• 7 years ago

I did a text editor once; it was bad.

cosmodisk• 7 years ago

For those who want a real challenge I'd recommend trying to write a code that could read/write PDF files without using any purpose built libraries.

jfoster2• 7 years ago

I think the #1 project every programmer should try is a project that has customers. There's so much involved in achieving that. It will possibly prove more difficult than any of these. It will probably lead to a different understanding of every other project that programmer then takes on, too.

chubot• 7 years ago

I agree with that and would add that dev tools are a manageable way for programmers early in their career to get feedback and learn what matters.

It’s pretty hard for one person to solve enough of a problem to have users in the general public. It obviously happens, but it’s not a sure thing.

It’s hard to get users that are not in the public too. I had internships early in my career working on IT stuff, at a large business and a university. I found those jobs were actually terrible for getting feedback from users because there was so much bureaucracy. The management would actually insulate you too much from complaints or feedback.

Dev tools are a good learning experience because programmers will give honest feedback if they don’t like something :)

tripzilch9• 7 years ago

I think the takeaway is that you shouldn't get feedback from users filtered through management. It's exactly the same problem that your "write dev tools for programmers" solution solves. You like it better because you expect you'll get the feedback from the programmers directly instead of through management. If that feedback would have to filter through someone's supervisor before it landed in your inbox, it would be about just as useless.

TAForObvReasons• 7 years ago

Some problems are "technically straightforward", where it is "easy" to build but "hard" to find and work with customers. To-do lists are a classic example.

Others are technically challenging. That difficulty is precisely why others don't tackle the problems, but generally customers are looking for a solution and you have a ton of flexibility when working with customers.

To put it in different terms, in some cases "if you build it, they will come" is true. The hard part is determining when it applies.

paxys• 7 years ago

Solving a programming problem is very different from solving a business problem, and building something that has customers falls more into the latter category. Lots of people want to simply improve their programming and problem-solving skills, and this list is perfect for that. Customers add a whole new dimension of complexity which most people might not want to deal with, especially with fun side projects. So setting the expectation that everything you build needs to have customers is definitely wrong.

Building stuff like a text editor, simple game, database etc. from scratch which will never be used by anyone other than yourself can be immensely challenging and satisfying.

ianai• 7 years ago

Build an oss driver for something popular. Or an alternative. Even just addons and plugins for popular products will get users. They don’t actually have to pay you for them to be customers, but that’s a benefit. Go where the demand is.

jfoster2• 7 years ago

It definitely will not be for everyone. It's a bit like how many people suggest learning to code just a little, even if not intending to pursue it as your career. It still leads to this huge new understanding of things. Similarly with programmers and customers.

tarsinge2• 7 years ago

I discovered over the years that I like solving business problems, but in that context programming is purely utilitarian and just a tool like I would use in another industry. But since I also love coding, I code in my free time without any constraint other than having fun and improving.

So for me the solution was simply moving away from an every day developer job at work and more into a product management/CTO like role.

markus_zhang3• 7 years ago

Or better, just forget about business customers, concentrate on problem solving skills, and build tools just for programmers.

Basically I found out the few customers you have and the further you are from business, the happier you are, i.e. considering you are still programming of course.

*Edit: For programmers focusing on businesses, the only happy solution, imo, is to be a consultant. But this basically asks for taking business skills. Of course this is a biased view as I work as a BA, who deals with business every minute.

gargarplex• 7 years ago

Counter-point: if a programmer is successful in delivering business value, the programmer might have an inflated view of their programming abilities. I know I certainly have been affected by this. Being able to get things done does not necessarily make a person a great and talented programmer, but it may make them accomplished.

My projects have grossed a lot of revenue, but several of these projects would be challenging for me and push my the limits of my skills.

What I am saying is that there is room for more nuanced language to describe all these matters in a way that is detached and clinical.

busterarm4• 7 years ago

Counter-counter-point: Delivering business value is a more desired and compensated skill than raw programming ability.

Moreover, learning how to deliver value builds empathy for non-programmers who also deliver value and also the realization that programming ability is not where a company lives and dies. These are the number one and number two things most often lacking in programmers.

I have to fight with "seasoned pros" on the regular to get them to stop doing things like sending passwords in email or worse, put them in text files in git. Because A) what the hell are you thinking and B) holy shit, we're a public company WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING!? You have to explain to them, repeatedly, why this is bad and also things like why a production-ready database isn't the same as the single-instance point and click AMI they spun up...

All of this because the only virtue that they know is "I shouldn't be blocked by anything." Unfortunately some of them are such skilled programmers that they'll drag entire IT and GRC organizations screaming in their wake trying to make sense of the mess.

kmarc• 7 years ago

This is me. Made some money myself, made a lot for bigco's, and constantly feeling that literally anyone else is better at writing software, actual programs than I am.

Also see: imposter syndrome :-)

scarface744• 7 years ago

What’s the use of “programming skills” in the abstract that doesn’t serve anyone’s needs?

“programming” is just a tool to me - not an end goal. I’m just as proud of the code that I was smart enough not to write and use an existing product/service/module for as I am for the code that I did write.

closeparen2• 7 years ago

That’s what we do at work all day. Business problems tend to be technically shallow, except when they aren’t, and to handle those you need to keep your skills up.

anonytrary2• 7 years ago

I don't disagree with you, but I think you're missing the author's point. The author suggested these projects as a quick way to learn a new language or get familiar with a set of tools. Arguably, working on a more time-consuming product for customers is not the most efficient way to do this.

The author's suggested projects hone in on programming mastery, whereas your suggested project hones in on a plethora of skills. We can't really say that one substitutes the other as they achieve two different things. I wouldn't necessarily start a startup just to learn WebAssembly, but I would learn WebAssembly if I needed to for a startup. In the former case, my goal is to learn WebAssembly, whereas in the latter, it's to start a startup.

wolco• 7 years ago

Not sure these are peojects to tackle with a new language. Simple repeatable projects like hn clones are better suited for those use-cases. More along projects to do in your favourite language bonus points for using language that isn't typical for the domain.

Like: A compiler in php or a spreadsheet in cobol or javascript console emulators.

azhenley8• 7 years ago

Author here.

I agree with you! This list was about projects for learning. A few months ago I had a blog post that was more product focused, regarding the lessons I learned from releasing games (I think they're generalizable though). Definitely a different world when you have customers to please and motivate you!

http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html

GuB-42• 7 years ago

From a technical standpoint, I disagree. Customers tend to get in the way of good code, they have everchanging requirements, set deadlines and priorities that more or less force you to be messy. Experimenting with techniques, redoing things, etc... is hard when you have a customer expecting this or that feature to be implemented yesterday, and yet, it is important if you want to progress.

Working with a customer will make you a better businessman, not really a better programmer.

Doing a project with customers is extremely valuable if you intend to start a business, but if you hate that and just want to be a good coder and make a living out of it, there is a solution: find a good boss/manager. He will take care about the business stuff and allow you to put all the skills you got doing toy projects to good use.

Otherwise, if you want to do something that looks more like a real-world project without the hassle of dealing with customers, make software that you really use, and share it. A good candidate would be a video game that you enjoy playing, or some tool for a hobby of yours, or a utility. That way, no one will stop you from experimenting, but you still need to think about usability.

reedwolf• 7 years ago

Customers tend to get in the way of good code

Wow, everything wrong with the tech industry right here.

vincnetas• 7 years ago

At the end of the day, the code is written for someone, to do something. Not to be. You gotta serve somebody as Bod Dylan said : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC10VWDTzmU

[EDIT] To elaborate, i recently thought about coding, and i understood that at some point all the code "touches" reality in some way, and that place is most important. Either it moves something physical, or provides answer to person, or makes him happy. But when coding is a good thing to ask your self, how my code "touches" reality.

Seirdy• 7 years ago

(Note: I speak only for myself and others who share my personal preferences)

This comment really hit home for me. Making something good is often at odds with making something that's profitable/popular. I've often found that the most popular software is far more bloated/limited than the best software. This might be because people like me tend to favor smaller programs that are FOSS and work well with other FOSS; this view is held by a minority, and is thus a less profitable niche to cater to.

One example is mpd+ncmpcpp versus Spotify or iTunes. The former is far more well-designed, performant, featureful, and flexible; however, it will never be popular/profitable because it's FOSS targeting end-users, it runs in the terminal, it lacks CPU-intensive pretty animations, and requires users to understand that it involves a client and a daemon.

The list goes on; from IRC/Matrix versus Discord, to Linux/BSD vs macOS/Windows (an opinion that's a bit more controversial here on HN, but held by many nonetheless), the list goes on. I've defaulted to assuming that if a program intended to be used directly by end-users is mainstream and/or quite profitable, it's likely not for me. The few exceptions (e.g., massive web browsers like Firefox) exist only because there is no alternative I can get away with.

manojlds• 7 years ago

Definition of programmer is different from developer.

cerberusss3• 7 years ago

I don't have experience with a side project that has customers, but several times I did do a side project for a paying client.

It was one of the most stressful periods of my life. I was picking them up with another programmer, and I completely failed to understand the amount and the quality they would deliver. I solved it by working day and night for a year or two, or so.

I'd say, do try a project that has customers. Think twice about a project for a client.

tripzilch9• 7 years ago

Wait, what's the difference between a customer and a client? I'm not a native speaker and always thought the words meant the same thing (they have the same root in my language).

I thought "client" was just the fancier term, therefore you have customers at a book shop and clients at a law firm. Does a hairdresser or tattoo artist have customers or clients?

scarface744• 7 years ago

How many programmers don’t work for companies with customers?

tripzilch9• 7 years ago

So I'm someone who codes for their own use, what I write isn't meant for customers, it's just tools that make the machine do what I need. Programming as a way of using the computer.

However I also used to do some freelance web development back in the day, and sure enough I did learn things. Mostly things about customers, not about programming. They don't know what they want, they don't know what is good and they need help with that. This is called requirements engineering, and IMVHO starting a project that has customers is the literal worst moment to start learning that. Fortunately I had a class about it in uni and I happen to be great at explaining technical things to non-technical people. I also learned that I'm actually really good at what I did (looks great + works well + happy customers), they gave loads of recommendations and I got requests for at least a year after. Too bad about the burnout that happened soon after, for no particular reason, that turned my life upside down.

Either way, yes it was educational but in no way did it make me a better programmer. Maybe a better business person? (And I'm not a very good business person)

All in all, I think I would recommend "a project that has customers" only to people who are young. It has less stakes when you're young and it's chock full of wonderful learning opportunities for young people. If you're older, I think that most of the lessons you would also have gotten through general life experience. Which again demonstrates how little this exercise has to do with programming. But yeah, it can definitely be a valuable experience.

johan_larson• 7 years ago

I can't help but notice that this post is just below PG's "Having Kids" post. That's a challenging project right there.

jenscow• 7 years ago

I was surprised to discover that interpreting BASIC to be more difficult than a C-like language, as most statements required their own syntax rule.

ldng• 7 years ago

How about contibuting to someone else hard project ? Because doing it alone, whatever the level of a task, is often easier than grasping existing code base and work with others ;-)

boothby• 7 years ago

What a great list! Adding some suggestions... some I've done, others are goals (especially APL and Prolog)

1. Design a new programming language. Prove it Turing complete (or go back to the design phase). Maybe do a compiler for it.

2. Design some hardware. There's cheap FPGAs and nice walkthroughs for architectures like the 6502, but my next project will probably be a custom architecture because I've never done a proper compiler before.

3. Raytracers! I did one in JavaScript back in '02... ah, how languages evolve...

4. Break your language paradigms! Learn Lisp, APL, Prolog, Haskell... This is a meta-challenge: do another challenging project in an unfamiliar language, and get to know powerful idioms in the language and how they're handled behind the scenes.

petethepig• 7 years ago

A few things I did in the past I would definitely recommend:

* Make a Lisp https://github.com/kanaka/mal — tutorial on how to make a lisp language interpreter.

* Make an 8 bit computer https://eater.net/8bit — tutorial on making a simple 8 bit computer out of a bunch of AND, OR, NAND chips. Really helps you understand how computers work, what microcode is, etc. Honestly, building it wasn't quite as much fun as I thought it would be, but just learning how to build one was very useful.

macintux2• 7 years ago

When I tried MaL I got hung up on the regex in one of the first steps, which is complex and tricky to translate into any of the umpteen other variants of regular expressions, and utterly vital to the overall project. Frustrating.

cletus• 7 years ago

Honestly, I hate the way these articles are framed: "X things every programmer should [read|try|learn]". I've certainly seen a list of 1000 books everyone should read. I hate the way these are framed because you'd spend your entire life doing all of them so it's clearly not practical.

Can we step away from the hyperbole here and just start saying (in this case) "Interesting project ideas" or somesuch?

This of course leads to people piping up their own "must dos" like "write a compiler" (huge undertaking).

Interestingly I see a comment here like "do something with actual customers" and the replies are interesting, essentially dismissing this as a business rather than technical problem.

I find this interesting because software exists to solve problems for people so this is probably the most useful advice I've seen. The ability to identify a pain point and use software to solve it is arguably the most useful ability a software engineer can have.

You will of course learn things by writing a compiler or . text editor or a ray tracer and if scratches an itch for you, by all means go for it.

calcifer2• 7 years ago

The author thinks these are valuable challenges every programmer should try. Not must, should. It's just an opinion. If you don't agree with it, then don't do the challenges. Why does it cause you to write a 200 word rant?

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

Why did cletus' post cause you to write a 40 word rant?

I thought it was a valid point. 1000 books I should read? If I devoted all my free time, for the rest of my life, I might make it. But that leaves me exactly zero time left for the next person who's got some fine-sounding "should" for me, or the next, or the one after that. It's all my time for the rest of my life - for one person's "should".

I don't think it changes the problem to say "should" instead of "must". It's just an opinion. It doesn't create any more of a "should" for me than it does of a "must".

nnain2• 7 years ago

I second this, when such advice comes from people who have some authority, it can be very confusing to a lot of young people entering the field. It could even be disheartening and really demotivating for some, who otherwise might have exceptional logicial/design/frontend/database/statistics/ML... skills.

bovermyer• 7 years ago

That list sounds great, and I can see how each of those projects presents a unique set of problems to solve.

For me, though, working on my day job and my "for fun" side project take enough of my time and brainpower. I never lack for problems to solve.

kresten• 7 years ago

Web developers should write a simple web server.

lancefisher3• 7 years ago

These are great suggestions!

A few years ago I worked through building a spreadsheet in JavaScript. It was a great introduction to interpreters. I read through Writing an Interpreter in Go by Thorsten Ball [1]. Constraining the interpreter to execute formulas in cells was a straight-forward way to approach building one from scratch.

Writing a Pratt parser as part of this forced me to understand how it works. Figuring out how to process a sheet led me into algorithms and structures like directed acyclic graphs (as mentioned in the article). I found myself referencing Introduction to Algorithms and really studying it [2].

In the end I turned it into a talk at Big Sky Dev Con in Montana. The whole thing was a good experience - from researching how to do it, to sticking it out through the implementation, to distilling it to a 45 minute talk. Be sure to check out the recording [3] and code [4] if you're interested.

Any of these suggestions will lead you down a rabbit hole of learning with a clear objective in sight to keep you motivated to dig deeper.

[1] https://interpreterbook.com/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT-Press...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj4h0DcVLL0

[4] https://github.com/lancefisher/cellularjs

will_pseudonym2• 7 years ago

Thank you for sharing this, Lance! I'm a "recovering actuary/Excel power user/Excel developer (shudder)" currently in Lambda School in their web development track.

I'm really enjoying watching the recording of your talk, and in addition to learning one way to build a spreadsheet, I'm also learning lots of good software development practices orthogonal to the specific project, which is great.

Again, thank you for sharing!

lancefisher3• 7 years ago

Thanks! Glad you like it!

anonytrary2• 7 years ago

I am curious why the author suggests programming spreadsheets is "hard" but programming an operating system isn't. Arguably, all you're doing in a spreadsheet is building a dependency graph of nodes, then re-rendering them when an input changes. It's about as complex as building your own React.

ncmncm• 7 years ago

Didn't somebody win an IOCCC contest with a spreadsheet coded in under 2K bytes?

macintux2• 7 years ago

https://adventofcode.com should probably be on the list. You end up doing bits of several of the suggestions along the way.

CuriouslyC2• 7 years ago

Meh. Doing a throwaway project just for the challenge of it is a horrible waste of time. Do something useful, if you choose your project wisely you'll learn just as much about coding, while simultaneously making the world a better place and filling out your portfolio/resume.

artiste• 7 years ago

If you just feel the urge to learn things and improve your skills then that doesn't always require the project to have some practical utility. The person who will learn the most is the one who simply does both useful projects and projects for their own sake. Obviously with only so much time it makes sense to prioritize the useful projects, but just speaking generally here.

mrobot• 7 years ago

software 3d renderer!

Madmallard• 7 years ago

You could try an realtime online multiplayer game if you want a category of difficulty past the emulator. Lol

prophesi• 7 years ago

Just a quick nitpick; could the link be updated to use https? I'm a bit surprised it doesn't automatically redirect in the first place.

lmilcin2• 7 years ago

* Low latency. Receive at 10k messages per second (one every 100 microseconds), have non-trivial amount of business logic, ensure all responses are sent within 50 microseconds. I did a proof of concept of algorithmic trading platform in C/Common Lisp for a brokerage house that was interfacing stock exchange, was tested to withstand 10k mps over an hour with 10 microseconds end-to-end latency (measured on switch). I learned A LOT.

* Non-trivial application with very restricted amount of memory, crappy networking, that has to be very reliable. I did an entire payment POS application (EMV, contactless) on a very ancient device. It had total of 2MB of memory (SRAM + flash, it had execute in place). I needed to do a lot of research to optimize the application for memory usage -- for example, had to implement transactional database to work within constant amount of memory. I also needed to research a lot of techniques to make my application reliable regardless of what happened. I also learned A LOT on that project.

saberience• 7 years ago

In typical HN fashion, this just sounds like an excuse to jaw about your resume projects.

How would these clearly niche projects be something "every programmer" should try? When in enterprise engineering is 2MB a normal amount of memory for something to need? I'ved worked in videogames, fintech, e-commerce and worked on many kinds of systems and not run into anything with such requirements.

Not to mention, the sorts of "lessons learned" on such projects could actually hurt an engineer when working on more realistic enterprise systems. At my current job (where I manage many teams of engineers), if I saw engineers micro-optimizing to save 2 MB of memory instead of getting features shipped I would ask their tech-lead wtf was going on.

I've seen far more damage done by premature optimization in my career than I've seen it actually help matters. Engineers trying to be "extra smart" and show of their extreme memory/cpu optimization skills so often leads to wasted time, hard to debug code, or worse, annoying bugs which are much more difficult to diagnose later.

lmilcin2• 7 years ago

You miss the whole point of the list. The idea is that experience of working on variety of projects makes you better developer in whatever field you are in.

This assumes you will understand where to use and when not to use those techniques.

The list gives examples of projects each with unique requirements. Each requiring you to think about the problem in a different way.

I just gave two more examples that I personally found very illuminating, that also have unique requirements, different from other projects on the list.

I may be working on some more mundane software atm but, for example, I know how specifying size of every buffer or any data structure is important for reliability of the service I am working on.

In fact, the service had bad track record of reliability which was quickly fixed by specifying what it means to do stream processing (no unbound data structures in memory, etc.) and quickly verifying each component against this spec.

I learned this and many others from MISRA which is standard to help write reliable software for automotive industry. I adopted it for my embedded app to help me work on complex app that had to be very reliable.

kzrdude• 7 years ago

Can you tell us more about what you learned from point one and two?

aurelianito• 7 years ago

Another interesting project is to do your own web framework. Routing, ORM, validations that work both server and client side, rendering server and client side transparently are some of the challenges. Just do something and improve some actual pain point you see with a popular one. I did mine and, even thou I have never used it for anything important, I still think it is a good learning experience and I can point to some aspects of it that are better than all the major web frameworks.

zoomablemind• 7 years ago

If the 'every programmer' already has a paying job, then there're may be other ways to advance their craft. For example, joining an open-source project that's worth their while and maybe contribute when ready.

Of course, one's motivations may be as diverse as their perceived rewards. Still, solving problems which need a solution always has a room for programming/design challenges, while working with others lets one connect and learn from the collective knowledge.

Eager minds with free time are precious!

tus88• 7 years ago

First, you'll have to learn to draw to the screen. I had no idea how this worked. You are actually clearing the screen then drawing each portion of the screen in rapid succession, many times a second, to create the effect that objects are moving.

Not if you're double buffering you aint.

tydok• 7 years ago

We use double buffering to avoid flickering, but still we have to clear the back buffers.

rb808• 7 years ago

Does anyone have a good guide like this but with good answers?

I can come up with decent solutions to problems, but the best way to learn is to be able to see alternatives you hadn't thought of so you learn something new.

randcraw• 7 years ago

My suggestion: build a basic calculator then extend it... Add scientific and fixed formats. Add functions like log, sine, exp - especially if you create the math ops from scratch. Detect roundoff error and suppress it gracefully. Add binary, octal, and hex base numbers and binary, shift, rotate and bitwise operations. Add 2D graphs and 3D surfaces. Add control of illumination and stacking order for multiple plots. Add animation. Evaluate expressions. Add programmability.

Or just invent your own private Emacs.

known• 7 years ago

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code is also good

jheenan1• 7 years ago

I think the best project to try is the one that you have little to no knoludge of. I find sometimes the best way to learn is by failing. For myself; i hate the feeling, and failing isnt somthing that I do well. Pushing through setbacks strengthens your abilities and produces a new confidence that anything is possible. Also you can bring in an outside perspective to a project that isnt typical to that field or group. When the project is complete; you look back and realize how far you have traveled! At that point the wealth of knoledge can be quantitatively measured. When we streach beoyond what seems possible, dig in a little deeper, and strive to become a little better than we are; at that point we grasp the intangible, at that point we define ourselves. Its thoes small victories that give birth to new innovation,define generations,and forges a way for everythings' future. If you stand up and tackel the unknow, brush off the ridicule of ignorance,and get crazy enough to defy logic itself; I belive thoes minuscule moments in the history of humanity are the very iota's that allowed God to see the future of man and understand his creation is 'good.'

nnain2• 7 years ago

I understand this is posted on a University website, so I guess it is ok, but gosh I've wasted way too many days of my early career chasing things that the 'seniors' said I 'should' do as a programmer.

This is just not true, but worse still it confuses people who are just starting. You can be an exceptional front end developer with HTML/CSS/JS scripts and not necessarily have a mini OS in your past projects.

choeger• 7 years ago

There is a difference between "must" and "should". Take this list as an advise on how to become better at understanding the fundamentals. A front end developer for instance could take html,js, and the DOM as gospel. Or they could try to understand their foundation and how the same concepts apply in different domains (e.g., what and why are the distinctive advantages/shortcomings of js). I prefer the latter and I think it makes me better at my job.

Also it is kind of sad when a fellow developer is stuck with a problem that can easily be debugged with some OS knowledge.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

This is a surprisingly nostalgic list. It's not that there's no benefit to these projects, it's that there are more modern projects - custom web servers, practical DSLs, 2D and 3D iOS/Android games, simple AR, simple ML, simple embedded hardware - at a similar level of difficulty, which are easier to extend to real commercial applications, and also teach important CS fundamentals.

You could also do worse than learn Erlang, Haskell, Julia, or some other interesting-but-not-really-mainstream language.

I'm surprised the author appears to be a millennial. I would have expected a list like this from someone my age, who started coding when TinyBASIC and Space Invaders were the new shiny.

Footpost• 7 years ago

   practical DSLs

Isn't embedding a "practical DSLs" another toy compiler?

Except that with a DSL, you have to worry about gnarly but not-so-interesting problems like what happens to my syntax (given by a CFG) when I add another syntax (another CFG)? Are the combined CFGs ambiguous etc?

Keep things simple!

yoda97• 7 years ago

Here's a good list of project based tutorials that you should follow https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning/

thallukrish• 7 years ago

I guess most of the time we do not know what we want to do. That's the time you can productively spend working on improving your skills. But unfortunately it is too hard to work on something that does not lead to worthiness of some sort. So I guess it is good to look for something worthy to be done in their life while sharpening your skills.

jonasft• 7 years ago

My "problem" is that I struggle to find the motivation to program side-projects, when I already spend 8hours a day programming at work

edisonjoao• 7 years ago

love this

Challenging projects every programmer should try

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