Things To Build

People always ask "what project should I build to learn programming?".

The following is a list of projects at increasing skill levels that provide structure for learning programming concepts. I'm assuming you know how to write hello world and how to do basic programmy things like write functions and loops, but these projects should provide avenues to learn more about the many rabbit holes it takes to make and understand software. We start simple, it should be like we're sitting at our PDP-11 or Commodore 64 and building our knowledge of computing as it happened through history. This way when we get to programming 3d games, we have a good understanding of every layer underneath. With the exception of a few starter projects, these all aim to have you build something ACTUALLY USEFUL. We want you to leave here with something nice.

Clicking on a project will take you to some example implementations...but don't cheat! Maybe just peek at these to make sure it's the level of complexity you're looking for. These implementations are also NOT GURANTEED to be good, and very likely guranteed to be the opposite.


beginner

Name Modes Description
hello cli the classic! make sure your compiler works and you can import the standard library make sure your compiler works and you can import the standard library.
hangman cli

easy

Name Modes Description
csv cli read a csv file...maybe sort it and write back to the file, or just print it prettily
zipper cli zip some files. add compression if you're feeling like an intellectual
heads_or_tails cli
mkdir cli learn the basics of cli apps. learn to read arguments and run syscalls. no matter which language you're using, you'll need to interact with a few common language libraries, and this is a good way to understand the os level commands for your chosen language
ls cli learn the basics of the file system. this one can be very simple at first then expanded upon to grow your understanding of a lot of common things. duplicating ls fully will lead you down a lot of little side-quests, none of which are too hard. you will learn about file permissions and modes, symlinks and hardlinks, parsing command line flags, writing recursive function, parsing text (LS_COLORS), and returning formatted text back to the user. lots of fun to be had here!
watcher cli take what you learned about the filesystem and implement a simple file watcher that takes an action when a file is updated

medium

Name Modes Description
browser tui,gui expand your knowledge of user interfaces, either tui or gui. this takes what you know from ls and applies it to a UI
spellchecker library implement your own spellchecker libary
version_control cli learn about hashing
tetris gui vidya game
sokoban gui vidya game
tetris gui vidya game