Projects Every Programmer Should Try 

My goto project is always a music player, it has networking, file management, byte stream management, all kind of data structures can be used for playlists, database access. Basically a simple to visualise project that covers everything.

I once wrote a Gameboy emulator in C# (C# MENTIONED!) and the hardest part is finding accurate information on how everything works. Plenty of resources on how 95% of it works, but I never found a single source that covers 100%. Second hardest part is understanding all that info making the damn thing work. Seeing a game display for the first time is insanely rewarding.

The satisfaction to be gained from getting a bare bones OS booting on hardware to a command line cannot be understated. The closest I've felt to a wizard in any programming project.

The best project I worked on in school - the one I learned the most but felt like I accomplished the least - was building a graphics editing program with simple animation tools and timeline. Figuring out layers, undo/redo, manipulating things on the canvas, the clipboard, all of it left me feeling like I was way in over my head and yet I came out with a clunky and ugly piece of software that I made all on my own. I was humbled but still proud

I also can definitely recommend writing a compiler if you want to be really good at programming in general - except when you write your first compiler, I'd really recommend to skip the whole optimization part. Code optimization has several problems: a) there is NO one approach fits all, instead you need to shove a plethora of different complex specialized algorithms into it b) this is ongoing research (even the theory of compiler optimization changes quickly with only a few exceptions) - this means you'll conceptually be not just between two but three moving targets c) a lot of even mildly sophisticated optimization algorithms are computationally hard. This means among others you'll need to get into heuristical algorithms, approximation theory & numerical computing as well which you otherwise wouldn't need to do in a compiler

I always recommend MUDs. It's a game but focused more on backend activities. You'll need to tackle sockets, file IO, RFC implementation (telnet), AI, etc. The sky is also the limit depending upon how complex you want to get.

Before starting on a text editor, I recommend trying to make a line editor first. It has similar constraints but more limited to a line-by-line basis; and you'll learn that there's a ton of ways you could abstract it with different data structures, each having their own pros and cons. I started with a simple interactive rebase editor in terminal when I learned Rust, and I still use it for rudimentary rebase tasks. This probably doesn't need a ton of optimizations for my uses, but you it can end up being a fun project to try and implement and optimize as you go, as you introduce more lines you have to start thinking about scroll buffers, etc. Which is also something you'll get into when writing a text editor.

This video couldn't be more recommended at the right moment than this to me. I was wondering what to do after finishing mooc fi intro to programming with python course and doubting myself of trying those seemingly niche project that on the surface doesn't contribute much to most dev jobs on the market. However seeing those type of projects are what made me interested in programming in the first place, glad to know that the knowledge you'll gain from those projects are applicable in the real world. Thanks for the insight Primeagen

I've had this bookmarked for years! Glad he's finally looking at it.

ive done a text editor with vim motions, an interpreter for my comp sci final, and a terminal game engine. All great projects that ive learned so much from, now all i have to do is get a job.

An email client is something I recommend to most junior (but capable) developers looking for a challenge. You can connect to and get mail from a POP3 client just from the commandline. Thx for the vid, sir!

I wrote a compiler in Java of a language similar to C back when I was doing my masters. Great experience, and very interesting to understand how things run when you compile your code.

Real-time multiplayer game architecture is amazing for learning networking and state management. One of my recent learning projects was just building flappy bird to support multiple players.

I wrote a filesystem with full volume encryption in JS so everybody would hate me and leave me alone. (the "leave alone" part didn't work out well)

A piece table is perfect if you want to be able to handle humongous files which wouldn't fit in RAM. For anything that would though, just use a line array and be done with it. Simple, reliable, fast.

Recently made a single thread synchro http server from scratch using sockets, was really fun learning how to parse incoming data into http request format(straight from http specifications), routing the uri to handlers (parsing the path) and request response cycle. It's very basic but got to learn a lot.

This is arguably the most useful information I have gotten from this channel. I usually just come for the rants (it's quite entertaining). Thanks for making the effort to make us better programmers than ChatGPT. Truly appreciated.

So I'm confused when people say you shouldn't go to college and then recommend stuff like this. What do you think you do in college? Literally all of these plus WAY more.

Writing a emulator can be quite easy and equaly valuable if you made based on you own "fantasy architecture". Just put together a program counter with a few memory adresses and basic set of assembly operations implemented through functions, and you can make a very simple virtual processor that can teach you the basics in hardware emulation.

I always recommand a project I got for uni, a text cloud generator. Not really complicated, but represent a bit a I/O, bit of algorithm with the collision, can add file reading, start from a cli that generate a .png to a UI with words removal. Really like this projet to learn new languages.

I do most of my coding in R, primarily for data science. Super basic and a pretty easy language to understand. It's also a fun language to work with if you're starting out, so long as you like making graphs, bar charts and machine learning. I dabble a bit in python though and these definitely sound like fun projects to try, especially the text-editor, compiler and OS.

"Reactive programming paradigm" - I'm pretty sure this is referring to how to update only the affected cells in the spreadsheet. If you make a change to a cell, you only want to recalculate the affected cells. A naive implementation would recalculate all cells and would be very slow for larger spreadsheets. This also could factor into display updates. Only repaint the cells that changed and are on screen. I've done some of both in a past position. You can run into some pretty tricky scenarios.

Haha the game loop thing hit me. First time I tried programming games was in Borland Delphi making pong using the predefined components like shapes and changing properties like top and left. I couldnt figure out why a simple game like pong use so much processing power lmao

I wrote textbox twice in c++ with mouse and keyboard support, shortcuts, clipboard support and everything. One time for monospace fonts only and 2nd time for any font + caching and support of many encodings it was fun 😊

Father Primeagen with his majestic soothing voice puts out a banger again...

Heh. Somehow I 've moved through half of this list, even when I didn't have the knowledge / resources to actually implement any of these things. Ended up making a tiny editor in Win32API (yes), a Space Invader-ish thingamajigg with Locomotive Basic (yes) and something trying to emulate yacc. So no, no full deep dive in any of these and all of them failed miserably both in implementation but most importantly in teaching me the things I should learn from them since I used some off the shelf stuff (esp. in the editor). But boy was the feeling there. I kinda feel the urge to revisit the compiler/interpreter one since basically this is - for me - a rite of passage for any engineer worth his salt.

I did the Text Editor a few years ago in Go. It used a Gap Buffer which was a fun data structure to learn

@4:11 - Keeping track of a cursor in a text editor is just a matter of keeping track of the index of the row you were on when you pressed up - Each time you press up you try to move up to the nth index in that row, where the index is stored when you first pressed up. Enter any other key, be it typing or another cursor moving key, and that stored index is reset.

a 3d software renderer is my go to. Maybe a bit simple compared to some of these, but it's always fun.

I love C, I think one of the interesting idea is to implement a C interpreter :)) If there are any other projects involving a quality use of DSA, please recommend to me! I want to be good at DSA, one of my career goals btw. And I mainly write code in C/C++ mostly C

NAND to Tetris is an amazing introduction to computing in general.

I am currently (on and off) writing multiplayer for unity engine (sockets, serialization without allocations, etc). Hard stuff, but very interesting.

Can definitely recommend building a compiler. I built one two years ago and now I can’t stop.

Back when I was first learning programming, the first thing I would do in each language was write an MP3 player

I actually bought the book The read test sounds useful for my next school project of implementing a mini shell

C# is a good language. I know C# takes a lot of shit for being a super-generic copycat of several languages/techniques that came out just before it, names unmentioned. But I think people will have to admit that it's like the Porsche of managed languages. Hear me out. I recently heard Porsche described as an 8-9/10 at everything, but not a 10/10 at anything. There are other cars that are faster but less reliable or can be hellish to work on in the long run, like Ferraris (lookin at you, C). There are languages that are simpler and easier to learn, but like Toyotas (Py&JS) they are never going to be anywhere near as performant. And there are those that are fantastic and more fun but nobody buys because of the difficulty of driving them, like the Dodge Viper (Rust). There are cars that try to do the same thing, or even did it first but couldn't keep up in the long run, like Lotus (Java). C# does everything these days, and does just about everything it does well, but it's never 10/10 in anything. Its has very consistent and well maintained and documented standard libraries. It's got a decent dependency management system with lots of well maintained public packages. It compiles down to either a portable IL or can compile to architecture-specific bytecode. Its memory management is simple and rarely needs any intervention for anything beyond advanced 3D games or HPC (which, why are you using C# for?). Performance is more than decent, support is easily available, it uses easy to learn syntax for anyone who has had any programming education in the last 30 years, and did I mention that its well maintained? New features frequently come out, and they're almost never breaking. I can't say I think C# is the best at anything, but it's better than most at just about everything. Even things it has no business being good at. But go ahead, flame me.

The mini operating system is suchhh a fun project

I believe in mixing different languages for various tasks you then understand the optimization of different parts of your code package I coded Cobol/IBM Assembler/Fortran/c/c++ (be careful)/Java/several others and other mainframe utilities ... many more in the old days Sometime you need high internal performance, at other times you need high level package models to manage Python/Java/... C/C++ etc. ... Assembler (only on occasion) ... We programmed a high level user interface in Cobol but it had a unique value assigned on every transaction so I needed IBM assembly machine code for that task to optimize the time cost for that tag.

Funny enough, I'm in the process of implementing an interpreter (as a bytecode compiler and custom VM) for a toy esolang (Rockstar). It's super interesting and helps me understand a lot of what makes languages like Python and JavaScript work.

You mentioned that undo isn't linear but I'm not convinced, every undo implementation I've interacted with has been linear, I've heard of tree based ones before, but I don't think it's an implied requirement.

Thanks for the discount on the "Writing an interpreter in go" book

currently porting a raylib example to zig to get a feel for it. After that i was gonna make the game of life (hasbro) to learn 2D more before i get into 3D for the game i actually wanna make.

Reactive programming is mentioned for spreadsheets because you don't want to redraw/recalculate all cells when something changes.

A basic Chip-8 emulator is surprisingly easy to create. It takes less than a week of casual coding to get the basics working.

It'd be awesome to see your take on an ECS

For the previous simple project I recommend, pick the software you want to use: Then pick one of his tasks and modify your model ... Then then work on specific things using that your model, then later on for each type of task he recommends as separate tasks if you wish pick your languages high level/low level ... I. E. Work your way into thinking about the deep crap of each of his deeper tasks .... with the ideal of a framework. Use different levels of code as you need User input/output/data management/specific task he requests/pick the one he recommends you want for it being simple or hard, our your interest. Also along the way experiment with different code bases from C/C++ (be careful), ... to javascript, whatever .... and mix take his recomendations.

We have to do a compiler In C, the project is due in 4 months, the semester hasnt started No-one has been taught C yet And later we will have to do a project in assembly language This is one semesters worth of work from my uni, we also have 2 other coding languages but they will be minor stuff in comparison to the compiler project

This is a pretty good list, I can never answer this question well when I’m asked. Now I’ll just fwd this to people 😅

I am literally building a text editor while watching this to learn!

Seems I'm hitting a bunch of these items, my current pet project is a 6502 emulator that emulates old 8bit systems. While this isn't entirely unique the project covers a lot of topics, understanding a simple CPU and how they actually work, designing how the peripherals interact, making it configurable, 2D graphics for the output (raylib), networking for a GDB interface to allow for debugging programs running on the emulator. Was started in Rust but have since moved over to Zig, this project covers a wide range of topics and greatly accelerated my learning of Zig (and CPU's). Highly recommend all of these types of project.

Everytime, I remember the headache of having to implement an undo feature. Never got around to solving it completely 4:55

i'm not convinced about the ctrl-z thing. vscode's implementation is linear.

I like this for heavy hitting deep coding .... I may look at this if I program again .... I think 1st. Create a simple database model (use an existing database or create a simple one) 2: create a data model from some information content. 3: create a Html data input/output for creating the information to be used. 4: create a user code to modify the data, store the data, retrieve the data, backups the data 5 Pick a simple process that the user can change in simple ways/store/read/backup

Another classic project is writing your own shell. If you make it a programmable shell it dovetails with compilers. I believe the interpreter book has you start with a REPL to boot.

The project im looking forward to starting is writing my own json lexer/parser. This will be my first project I start after getting a job

The mini operating system interests me but i got no idea where to start and build up on.

If you want an easy way into games, focus on UI programming. The text editor is a good idea, but also a window manager environment is great. Learn to make the UI run on a separate thread so the menu can be brought up at any point in the game, even during loading screens. All of this is because good UI programmers are rare.

I went through Text Editor implementation 30 years ago when tried to start Windows 3.x programming

oh my god. that course you just described is the problem that I am having. Like the seniors I work with do more doing vs teaching.

A chat app with social media authentication is a great little project for beginers!

Skip lexing+parsing and do it all in one go with Parsing Expression Grammars. Better yet, it's easy to take a PEG and turn it into a parser with a function.

That is a very decent list

I did a bunch of these in university. I don't think I'd remember how to do them now, 15 years later. lol

As far as 2D games go, tetris is a fun one to implement.

09:50 i really wanna write my own language, and compile it into C# as well. why C#? it has simple yet can be advanced enough if you want to, you can create unions, you can allocate space on the stack, you can do anything without allocating any managed memory. etc but also you can just use and allocate managed stuff if you dont wanna deal with something at that time. so flexible enough. and there are also C# compilers that will just compile it into machine code and not gonna include GC at all because you didnt use any managed type. and im pretty sure a compiler can optimize C# code better than C code because it has more info on what is what, and less unpredictable stuff that compiler cant optimize. so i can just focus on the language syntax and typing system and etc. and not worry about compiling to assembly and low level optimizations.

Excellent ideas for the more advanced stages. However, I do struggle to understand how people can't think of projects to build. Just do what you enjoy and want to use. Solve a problem for yourself.

I'm genuinely scared to try and write a text editor. You start it to learn the language and 5 years later it completely consumes your life and it has a user base of 5 people...

14:00 Watch out! when trying to write your own OS! I've found out myself this is harder then this guy makes you want to believe - NOT because it's algorithmically or conceptually difficult but because a shitload of things around kernel & bare-bone binaries running on real or emulaed hardware without the usual userspace is really different, tedious, requires hardware or platform-specific knowledge (=spend hours seeking specialized detail knowledge on the interweb & crawl archives of forum you didn't even know existed) about lesser known features/bugs & are also more difficult to debug because debugging hardware may be different then debugging software.

Making your own forth is fun

Most undo/redo implementations are linear though

"What data structure should we use?" C# SortedDictionary sitting there, temptingly in every single instance despite the massive performance cost.

Just write operating system from scratch Like fr, learning all those things from writing an OS is insane, as insane as learning rust and learning vulkan. Literally an "AHHH, thats why" moment

I've been trying to get into Vulkan on top of Qt6 (for cross-platform compatibility) but there is just a dearth of materials on the subject.

The "what should I do" question always baffles me. I have plenty of ideas, but no time

If you want a challenge, create a text editor but you have to write about 90% of the code for it in the text editor you are creating.

i have no clue where to start for the text editor. would it be a commandline thing or a graphical thing. and if its graphical, I need to use gtk or CoreGraphics/CoreGraphics or something

I forget how to read because father reads us a nice bedtime programming article everyday

I always found that these kinds of projects don't really work for me. I just can't motivate myself to spend weeks if not month building an operating system, text editor or whatever that in every single way will be worse than any text editor or operating system was in 1990. I derive my motivation to build and learn things out of solving actual problems. So fixing a tiny bug in an open source project is 100x more interesting to me, than building a clone from scratch.

Gdi prime, now I got two books and I need yo write a compiler....and interpreter 😢 I was looking at this from TJ earlier last week but eff. Okay let's go

I have implemented the text editor, or better, an edit box, so to speak, when I was 18 in Turbo Pascal. I basically wrote what in Pascal is called a Unit (substantially a library) to have edit controls, where the text was shifting left and right if you were inserting more than the characters you could fit on the input control. Also I created another module to create menus and menu items. And yes, you could handle everything with the mouse as well, since I use DOS interrupts to handle the mouse. it also made the monochromatic version cause it has to run under a Olivetti M24. It was fun, now programming sucks.

Hey I am currently in a non programming role more of a cloud + databases + testing. But I decided to learn programming side by side and I am using python. Yes sorry for that but python seems easy to me to learn. So this vid will be really helpful.

C# mentioned

I make apps that I want to use, even tho there's thousands of them and they're better than what I will make I just make my own anyway because it's fun to use something you create.

If you want to build a house, you gotta learn how to make a hammer, which is made of minerals consisting of silver, copper and bronze. So learn how to mine the minerals. But where do the minerals come from? Well you'll have to study physics and get deep into string theory, so I suggest you start there. Finally when you learn the beginning of the universe, you can then forge the hammer to then begin hammering a nail. Useless projects

I did the compiler in college.

OK, this one is interesting.

how do I find the time to do the personal project? how long should I spend on those project? A month, 2 months, a year?

Cool more project sto my 300 item long ToDo list.

My girlfriend heard Primeagen's voice and thought it was Michael Scott speaking

i've always found this advice interesting, because i do understand the value of learning by doing, but what if i have no clue what to do or where to start? like honestly for all of the 6 projects in the video i have no idea how to do it or where to even begin to approach it, imposter syndrome is hitting hard, any advice from people who have overcome this?

-> A game -> A networked database -> A threaded gui application

2:40 this sounds kinda like what i've done when i've implemented text boxes in opengl, except my opengl text boxes didn't have cursor positions, text selection, or newline support

I build 3 compilers on my life by working on the kernel of a telecom company. There is to much to flexibility you need for your customers to be able to get away without it. So I would not say is academic, I would rather say it is rare to face ;)

How do you learn something hard like programming a gesture library? Do you just read other code?

5:19 felt that keyspam, dvorak users unite 🤜

A friend of mine was asking how to decide between all the options presented in the video, thoughts?

the state for 1) doesnt seem that hard, just emulate a vim clone without a bunch of commands and have the mouse be an enum or interface object that implements keyboard, movement while in insert mode, and give it like an abi for interfacing with the buffer, with that i mean a working prototype should take 2 hours after having a basic ui abi

Ngl, i am programming since i am 13 and doing it as a job since 5 years now and... i couldn't program a nice text editor.

Prime reading at gigahertz Someone had sugar Gotta go blazingly fast

I made a space invaders in basic3 when I was in high school 🎉