Backend · Advanced · 2–3 weeks
Distributed Background Job Queue
A Redis-backed job system with multiple workers, retries, scheduled jobs, and a dead-letter queue, plus a small dashboard showing what's running and what failed.
- Go
- Redis
- PostgreSQL
- Docker Compose
- Prometheus
Features
- Enqueue API with priorities and delayed jobs
- Exponential-backoff retries and a dead-letter queue
- Horizontally scalable workers with graceful shutdown
- Idempotency keys that prevent duplicate processing
- Metrics endpoint for throughput, latency, and failure rate
Bonus: A chaos test script that kills workers mid-job and proves, with logs, that no job is ever lost.
Backend · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Webhook Relay & Replay Service
Receives webhooks from services like Stripe or GitHub, verifies their signatures, stores them, and forwards them reliably to your apps with retries and one-click replay.
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- Fastify
- PostgreSQL
- BullMQ
- OpenAPI
Features
- Per-source HMAC signature verification
- Durable storage with a searchable delivery log
- Retries with backoff and a per-endpoint circuit breaker
- Replay any stored event to any endpoint
- OpenAPI spec with generated API docs
Bonus: A small CLI that tunnels live events to localhost so developers can test webhooks on their own machine.
Backend · Advanced · 2 weeks
API Gateway with Rate Limiting
A reverse proxy that sits in front of your services and handles authentication, rate limiting, caching, and request logging so the services don't have to.
Features
- Config-driven routing to multiple upstream services
- Token-bucket rate limiting per API key, shared across instances through Redis
- JWT validation and API key management
- Response caching with TTLs and manual invalidation
- Structured access logs and latency metrics
Bonus: k6 load tests that publish p50, p95, and p99 latency with and without the gateway in front.
Mobile · Intermediate · 2–3 weeks
Offline-first Field Inspection App
A mobile app for technicians who inspect equipment on site: checklists, photos, and signatures that work with no signal and sync later.
- React Native (Expo)
- TypeScript
- SQLite
- Supabase
Features
- Dynamic checklist templates loaded from the server
- Photo capture with on-image annotation
- Local-first storage with background sync and conflict handling
- Signature capture and PDF report export
- GPS-tagged inspections
Bonus: A small web admin dashboard where managers create templates and review submitted inspections.
Mobile · Intermediate · 2 weeks
Bluetooth LE Sensor Companion App
A phone app that discovers a Bluetooth Low Energy sensor, streams live readings, keeps a history, and sends settings back to the device.
- Flutter (Dart)
- flutter_blue_plus
- SQLite
- ESP32 or nRF52 as the peripheral
Features
- Scan, connect, and auto-reconnect to the device
- A custom GATT service and characteristics that you define
- Live charts of incoming readings
- Local history with CSV export
- Write settings like sample rate and thresholds back to the device
Bonus: Firmware updates delivered over Bluetooth straight from the app.
Data & ML · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Resume ↔ Job Description Matcher
Upload a resume and a job posting. It scores how well they match, highlights missing skills, and suggests stronger bullet points.
- Python
- sentence-transformers
- spaCy
- FastAPI
- Streamlit
Features
- PDF parsing and section extraction (experience, skills, education)
- Skill extraction against a curated skills taxonomy
- Semantic similarity scoring with a readable explanation
- Gap report listing missing and weak skills
- A small labeled test set that measures accuracy
Bonus: Benchmark three embedding models on your test set and publish the results table in the README.
Data & ML · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Webcam Hand-Gesture Controller
Recognizes hand gestures from a webcam in real time and uses them to control slides, media playback, or smart lights.
- Python
- MediaPipe
- PyTorch or scikit-learn
- OpenCV
Features
- Hand landmark extraction from live video
- Data-collection tool for recording custom gestures
- Trained classifier with a confusion matrix and accuracy report
- Smoothing and debounce so actions don't misfire
- Config file that maps gestures to actions
Bonus: Export the model to ONNX and run it fully in the browser with a live demo page.
Data & ML · Advanced · 2–3 weeks
Predictive Maintenance for Jet Engines
Predicts the remaining useful life of jet engines from sensor time series using NASA's C-MAPSS dataset, served behind an API with a monitoring dashboard.
- Python
- pandas
- LightGBM or PyTorch
- MLflow
- FastAPI
- Docker
Features
- Exploratory analysis and time-series feature engineering
- A baseline model and an LSTM, compared with proper time-based validation
- Experiment tracking in MLflow
- Model served through FastAPI inside Docker
- Dashboard showing predictions per engine
Bonus: Data-drift detection that flags when incoming sensor data stops looking like the training data.
Data & ML · Intermediate · 2 weeks
Codebase Q&A Assistant
Index any Git repository and ask questions like "where is authentication handled?" Answers cite the exact files and lines they came from.
- Python
- tree-sitter
- sentence-transformers
- pgvector or Qdrant
- FastAPI
- An LLM API
Features
- Code-aware chunking by function and class using tree-sitter
- Hybrid keyword and vector search
- Answers with file and line citations
- Incremental re-indexing when new commits land
- An evaluation set of 30+ questions that measures retrieval accuracy
Bonus: A VS Code extension so you can ask questions without leaving the editor.
Games · Advanced · 2–3 weeks
Multiplayer Arena with Real Netcode
A fast top-down browser arena game with an authoritative server, client-side prediction, and lag compensation, so it feels smooth even at 150 ms ping.
- TypeScript
- HTML Canvas or Phaser
- Node.js
- WebSockets
Features
- Authoritative server running at a fixed tick rate
- Client-side prediction with server reconciliation
- Entity interpolation for other players
- Lobby and simple matchmaking
- Built-in network simulator with latency and packet-loss sliders
Bonus: A replay system that records inputs and plays back any match deterministically.
Games · Intermediate · 2–3 weeks
Procedural Roguelike with ECS
A turn-based dungeon crawler with procedurally generated levels, built on an entity-component-system architecture.
- Rust + Bevy
- or C# + Godot
- WebAssembly build
Features
- Seeded dungeon generation using BSP or cellular automata
- Entity-component-system architecture for all game objects
- Field of view and A* pathfinding for enemies
- Items, inventory, and save/load
- A playable web build published on itch.io
Bonus: A daily seeded challenge where everyone plays the same dungeon.