There is no joy without pain.

This guy gets it.

The difficulty ratings most of the listed stuff for me would be at least 8/10 up to 10/10. I mean this guy rates Threaded Virtual Machine as 6/10 and just takes 1 week to do it. Why isn't x86 OS kernel or a Compiler for a C-like not a difficulty of 10/10? There is no task this guy rated as 9 or 10/10 difficulty. I don't know who the audience for this guys blog is, but its way above my head.

I've always wanted to write a chess engine.

I love this site !!

I have always wanted to make something but its just so time consuming. I also dont have ideas for something that isnt complex. ...and I refuse to use an llm to do it, for me thats fake and not real learning.

Upvote for recommendation to make a GBA game. GBA is seriously a joy to dev for.

I always write toy software. I derive joy from writing in G'MIC.

Aggressively avoid over-engineering, restrict yourself to only whatever code is necessary to achieve your goal.

I have to repeatedly tell myself this when building out prototypes. It's surprisingly difficult to not get lost in the weeds doing something not immediately necessary like setting up CI/CD or modularizing components.

I guess, this is different from automating a part of your workflow every so often, in that you don't yet know the surrounding context. It is the point to just dick around with some new context for a bit.

And if you get bored of it, i.e. you've learned enough about the new context, then you can just archive the repo and move on, because you don't actually need it as a solution.