Ask HN: What side project improved your skills the most?
What would be a good idea to create as an intermediate programmer that would really broaden the experience
In my case it was a synthesizer. "How do I make sound from numbers?" sent me down a rabbit hole that forced me to grapple with DSP math, bit fucking, and manual memory management: stuff you never encounter doing the usual CRUD nonsense.
And most importantly, it was fun. If your project feels like work, drop it. I will never waste my free time messing with webdev, architecture, testing, etc because those things are boring and suck and I'm not being paid to care.
What you should build depends on what you want to learn. I built a full-stack app to learn server-client, a B2B application forced me to learn DevOps. Now I'm back to algorithms and Go by working on https://cuelang.org
What would you like to learn?
I work mostly in server-side apps with Python and I thought trying Go is a good idea.
You could build a server, but I'd personally find something like https://nats.io (messaging) https://fission.io (serverless) or https://redis.io (cache) more interesting. You might also look at the Kubernetes ecosystem. Building a tool or service that can interact with the API can lead to new opportunities (people hiring specifically for operator experience). I work on a code generation tool (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof) and https://github.com/cuelang/cue
Go's source is also pretty interesting and full of great things (https://github.com/golang/go). Here are some of the internals pulled out: https://github.com/rogpeppe/go-internal