On Twitter yesterday, Amy Hanlon asked everyone for lists of short self-contained programming projects, and I realized I’ve been collecting one of those in my head for the past few years. Time to get it out of my head and onto a blog!
Energy level permitting, I try to spend a lot of time practicing my development skills. And because of my priorities as a developer – integrating early and often, responding to changes, not building what’s not needed, incremental delivery – I prefer projects with a real UI that can work end-to-end, rather than narrower things like math problems. For me, a good exercise project has a few key features:
- Short: I can see interesting results within a few hours, and some results even sooner.
- End-to-end: The project produces real software with a user-interface (even if it’s a simple one like a command-line script).
- Expandable: Once I have some working code, it should be easy to think of new features.
- Variable: There should be room to change requirements over time in ways that break my assumptions and test my code’s ability to evolve
- Fun: The problem should be something I can care about enough to stay engaged.
My List
With all that in mind, here are some of the projects I’ve found myself coming back to in my years of practice:
- A Simple Blog: This can be as small as one page to list posts and another to write them, but it’s got lots of room to grow. A few ideas: Support multiple users! Let people edit blog templates! Change how posts are stored (in memory? in a SQL database? NoSQL? Text files?)!
- A Simple Wiki: How simple can you make it? How do you make it more powerful without sacrificing the beautiful simplicity of its interface? Also great because there are a lot of existing examples to compare your code to.
- Clone robotfindskitten: It’s delightful, and also has a suprisingly detailed spec if you want one.
- Conway’s Game of Life: This is a favorite at code retreats for a reason. There are interesting design puzzles in how to implement the rules, and there’s room to grow in interesting ways to. Consider: working with an infinite board; making a simple ASCII-art UI, then moving toward a graphical one later; changing your algorithm to something like Hashlife.
- Recruiting Puzzles: Some companies give interesting coding puzzles as part of the process when you apply to work with them. I’ve probably written a dozen versions of the Cyrus code test over the years. You might need to apply to get a copy of it, but then, maybe you should! ITA Software used to do this, and still has a big library of puzzles online. I’ve had a lot of fun with their Instant Search puzzle.
- The BSC Messaging Exercise: This is a problem some of us developed at Boston Software Craftsmanship to experiment with different design styles. It tries to tackle some realistic integration problems, while faking out enough complexity to be doable in under an hour.
- James Shore’s Architectural Design Challenge: A conscious attempt to invent a tiny toy problem that’s still a useful tool for thinking about software architecture.
- Uncle Bob’s Payroll Example: I don’t have a great link for this one. Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices, by Robert C. Martin, includes an extended example of a small payroll system. He details a bunch of use cases for it, and describes how he would implement it, which means there’s a great opportunity to try it for yourself and then compare.
- The AuctionSniper example from GOOS: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests is one of my favorite programming books, and contains another extended code example. I haven’t tried doing my own implementation of this one, but I bet it’d be a great exercise.
Moar Lists
This isn’t the only list of toy projects! There are a bunch of others out there that are similar in spirit. A few I know of:
- Karan Goel’s 100 projects for learning Python: I only saw this when Thomas Mayfield linked to it yesterday in response to Amy’s original question, but it’s great! Such a variety of problems!
- The Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies: This isn’t updated anymore, but has a few great puzzles. It came to my attention when my coworker Aldric pointed out how much fun he’d had with challenge #9, Interactive Fiction.
- The Ruby Quiz: Speaking of Ruby, the Ruby Quiz has a big list of small programming problems. Mostly smaller than the ones I tend to look for, but good if you’re learning the language. (And some of them aren’t that small!)
- Code Katas: These are short coding exercises intended to be done repeatedly as a form of deliberate practice. The ones on that site are good, but it’s also a good term to Google for if you’re looking for more exercises. Despite the somewhat problematic name, they’re a pretty useful learning technique.
- Project Euler: This is a huge list of small programming problems, that become progressively more complex. The problems tend to be very mathy, and emphasize exactly the set of skills that my own list underemphasizes. Good stuff!
Finally…
Many thanks to Danielle Sucher for pointing out that my Twitter spam on this topic yesterday would make for a good blog post, and to Amy Hanlon for bringing it up in the first place. This was apparently just the encouragement I needed to start blogging again!
So, how about you? Do you have any favorite programming problems you use for practice? (Oh yeah, I’m also experimenting with having comments here.)
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