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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

I’ll plug my series of project ideas that have also been discussed here on HN over the years: Challenging programming projects every programmer should try

https://austinhenley.com/blog/challengingprojects.html

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I've seen your list before and find it much easier to appreciate than the OP tbh. It is very concise, the descriptions actually describe what one might learn or struggle with and each project comes with resources to get started with (One day i might even get around to doing one of these ;)

The OP very much comes off to me as a "here are 100 books you need to read before you die" recommendation porn type of post where the author has done none of the things listed.

Agreed this is more appealing to read and visually look through even.

The OP link feels like a list you scroll until you see something that interests you, and you jump on that. An ideaboard.

The link in this chain feels like a mini-curriculum. AKA "you do all these 7 things and you'll probably become very good at any job". a decent university will probably have you do 4-5 out of these projects (making a spreadsheet program is truly a huge feat, though).

They both have some use, but different use cases in my eyes.

As part of undergrad we had to implement space invaders on a Zync FPGA so you got to choose which bits you did in hardware and what was in software. It was a blast seeing what people came up with as you could do “extras” that gave you bonus points. Someone built a simple microphone frequency analysis block so you could go left, right, and fire by playing notes on a recorder.

>on a Zync FPGA so you got to choose which bits you did in hardware and what was in software.

You mean verilog vs block diagram, or did those boards have like a microcontroller too for more normal software?

The Zync platforms I'm familiar with have an Arm processor, so you can write baremetal programs or have it boot Linux from an SD card. You can integrate hardware (FPGA) and software by reading/writing to shared memory over AXI or similar protocol.

One of my first programs was a Space Invaders-style game, in Machine Code, on a VIC20.

Not particularly impressive, but it did teach me stuff.

I like this list more.

I'm not sure if list is objectively better or whether I have had a good go at every one of these except for the spreadsheet. Implementing spreadsheets may be a challenge but not enough for me to want a spreadsheet.

I recall bookmarking this before (guilty!), thanks!

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