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.