What projects to start building after learning fundamentals of programming to get out of the tutorial and MOOC rabbit hole? It's more like taking the training wheels off at some point while learning to ride a bicycle.
I know the suggestion is to build what I like. But what if I don't have any problem at hand because I don't know the space much. What projects can I start with? Things that can operate as standalone projects and can be used.
I find most university courses are also limiting in this aspect. They only ask to implement part of the project (only a few functionalities). Maybe I haven't looked into many. I am not saying university courses or books are useless. They have their place. They can be very useful to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. But they are not all in all. We have to build tangible concrete things and get things done. They may be small projects. Atleast that's what makes a great designer or in general engineer. They make things in their garage or workspace even if they are tiny projects.
What type of projects (guided or not) can I build so that I can get an idea of the space and they start getting ideas of my own to build. Along the way I have to read up stuff e.g: unknown datastructures or algorithms to fill in my knowledge bucket.
And also I have doubts regarding how far can I go with that rudimentary knowledge of programming? When do I start learning more about other things like systems, algorithms, databases, etc?
This was usually a super Star Trek game, or an implementation of Life (which led to a fair number of language wars), or a 4x4x4 tictactoe or chess program. One hacker won his spurs making the best checkers program going. More complex projects were binary file editors, system utilities (magtapes pretending to be DECtapes!) or OS mods. Some were lucky to get to an hacking Mecca - these are the ancient heros. Acceptance could not be purchased, only earned and poseurs were ridiculed.
I assume things are similar now, with GitHub replacing card drawers and net based communities replacing f2f. “Because I could” was an amazing goad, particularly when you didn’t know the limitations. Cracking, while useful, wasn’t anywhere near as worthy or honourable. Hackers make neat things. It’s the making not the knowledge itself, and whether the thing is used is a secondary but satisfactory gain.
Decades on, I’ve written miles and miles of code, but very little of it was neat. Useful, commercially successful, yeah, but only a few things here and there made me sit back and smile - these things would have passed muster back then. I hope others get to experience such feelings a few times in life.