[Newbies] Re: [squeak-dev] Project Ideas

[Brett Kosinski]

> This has been sent to both the Squeak-dev list and the squeak beginners list
>
> For those of you that don't know me, I am a 14 year old programmer.  I want
> to write something useful, but I don't have any ideas!  I have always had
> this problem, with any language, and, all of the problems that have been
> going around on the mailing lists seem to hard for me to work on, as I am
> not very proficient as a developer and I am looking for some easy beginner
> projects!  Thank you in advance!

IMHO, the best projects are the ones you've come up with yourself.  In
the end, virtually every one of the projects I've worked on has been
one where I either needed a tool to solve some job and the existing
solutions didn't do it for me, or there was some problem space I was
simply curious about.  In the latter case, more often than not, there
are much better solutions out there waiting for me to just pick up and
use, but, of course, that's not the point.  The point is to try things
out yourself, just for the fun of it.  As an example, I decided to
write my own raytracer a while back (just like probably millions of
other programmers :).  Now, there are a ton of raytracers out there,
every one one far more capable than the one I wrote.  But the point of
the project wasn't to create something unique or useful.  It was just
fun!

So, to sum it up:  do something you like and that you're interested
in.  Don't worry if it's useful.  Don't worry if anyone will care.
You're 14, for goodness sake, you've got plenty of time to make your
mark. :)  And those projects *you* come up with are ones you'll likely
be far more passionate about and interested in.

Incidentally, among a few projects in my earlier days, there was:  a
little space invaders-style game, a breakout-style game, a simple fire
simulation, a basic starfield renderer (you can see what my early
interests were :), a version of the old snake game, an equivalent of
the readline library with history (back in my old Pascal days)...
notice, none terribly original, but I sure had a good time, and I
learned a heck of a lot.

Brett.