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Learn Programming @programming.dev ericjmorey @programming.dev

People often say they can't think of any ideas to practice coding. Maybe try this suggestion for some inspiration.

I asked some LLM chatbots to give me some silly ideas to try. Below are a few of my favorite responses.

From Perplexity.ai

Six Degrees of Wikipedia: Creating a program that finds the shortest path between two random Wikipedia articles using graph traversal algorithms. This applies graph theory concepts to explore connections in a large knowledge base.

Emoji Encryption: Using hash tables and cryptographic algorithms to create an encryption system that converts text to emojis. This could be an interesting way to explore cryptography concepts in a fun, visual way.

From Gemini.google.com

Procrastination Station: This website creates increasingly elaborate and ridiculous tasks to distract you from what you actually need to do. Dishes? Nah, fold your socks into origami cranes!

Dramatic Password Validator: Forget boring error messages. This program rejects weak passwords with Shakespearean insults or movie villain monologues.

From Chatgpt.com

  1. Time Travel Email Service: Build a data structure that allows you to send emails to yourself in the past, with time complexity considerations that are totally ignored because it’s time travel.
  1. Mood-Driven Random Number Generator: Implement an algorithm that generates random numbers based on the mood of the user, using sentiment analysis on real-time facial expressions.
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3 comments

  • Sentiment seems to be split according to votes. Anyone care to share their opinion?

      1. Random useless text from AI, no questions, nothing technical
      2. IMHO, this place is for people who learn, and we help in the comments, not “here is a burger recipe if you are hungry while learning to code”
      3. The so called propositions are stupid. It’s a mix of dumb ideas with solutions that are way too complicated for a beginner. What is the point of mixing emojis as an encoding system (UTF-8 and shit, it’s hard) with encryption (totally unrelated and way harder)? Or using graph theory with HTTP and parsing HTML, what is the point, what are you learning? Way too advanced and distracting for me.

      Downvoted.

      • Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

        I see a lot of people learning to program struggle to think of project ideas. This is an attempt to provide a means to get past that mental block. I feel it fit the purpose of the community which is offering to help those that are learning to program. I appreciate that you and others can disagree with that.

        It seems you've interpreted this post as giving suggestions which must or should be followed as written rather than a way to inspire ideas for projects one might be interested in. With that view, I can see why you'd think that these specific suggestions are not good projects as they are intentionally silly and useless and poorly defined. But to answer your specific concern about what's the point of taking on a nonsensical project, it's to identify something that you don't know how to do but have interest in doing then learn how to do it and have a bit of low stakes fun while doing so.

        Thanks again for giving your opinion. It's clear that this approach isn't going to resonate with everyone.