Post #3763414
2026-07-11 03:30 UTC
@NuclearOatmeal@beige.party @hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange Star charts. Bonus points for dragging in distance information and doing spiffy views of what things look like hundreds of light years from Earth.
(This is a bit more than a “just starting out with a language” problem, but this particular one helped to get me started in software development in the first place, and also to bootstrap an early and somewhat unfocused web dev career to something more substantial.)
Replies (1)
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@dpnash@c.im 2026-07-11 03:37
@NuclearOatmeal@beige.party @hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange Although I haven’t done these to bootstrap a brand new language so far, a couple of smallish projects I did just for fun that would be good for this task: 1. Sudoku solver. This was a problem in an online puzzle series I did a while back and it’s pretty straightforward to do a somewhat naive but useful solver and then, as you describe, make it better as you understand more techniques. 2. Classical cipher codebreaking (the kind you can break with just stats; a surprisingly large number of the old-school pre-Enigma or so ciphers, even ones that are much harder to crack than newspaper-style cryptograms, are fun to figure out how to break that way).