Recommended audience: CS students
Austin Henley shares some properties of a good side project. Personally, I think having a clear shippable objective is what most people lack, and prevents them from ever being complete.
I remember having side-projects suggestions during my courses. Maybe that’s something I have to incorporate in mine.
Most of what I’ve learned during my degree was doing side-projects. From competing in hackathons, creating a junior company, organizing conferences, doing a couple of research internships, and doing some freelancing work, these projects all taught me something that was not in the syllabus. That’s what separates you from the average student, and what will get you a good job in a world where unemployed software engineers are aplenty.
Joshua Barretto shares a really interesting list of possible side projects:
- Regex engine (5 days)
- x86 kernel (2 months)
- Gameboy emulator (3 weeks)
- Gameboy advance game (2 weeks)
- Chess engine (5 days)
- Physics engine (1 week)
- Voxel engine (2 weeks)
- GUI Toolkit (3 weeks)
- Posix shell (5 days)
- Dynamic interpreter (2 weeks)
- Compiler (3 months)
- Threaded Virtual machine (1 week)
- Text editor (4 weeks)
The last four will give you an heads up in the programming language world. I might even have an internship for you.
Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate. If you want that sort of learning, read a book – the joy in building toy projects like this comes from an exploration of the unknown, without polluting one’s mind with an existing solution.