Project Roulette / Projects

Backend, Mobile and Games projects

7 of 30 projects. Each has a stack, five features to ship, a difficulty, a time estimate, and a bonus challenge.

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

  1. Enqueue API with priorities and delayed jobs
  2. Exponential-backoff retries and a dead-letter queue
  3. Horizontally scalable workers with graceful shutdown
  4. Idempotency keys that prevent duplicate processing
  5. 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

  1. Per-source HMAC signature verification
  2. Durable storage with a searchable delivery log
  3. Retries with backoff and a per-endpoint circuit breaker
  4. Replay any stored event to any endpoint
  5. 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.

  • Go
  • Redis
  • JWT
  • Docker
  • k6

Features

  1. Config-driven routing to multiple upstream services
  2. Token-bucket rate limiting per API key, shared across instances through Redis
  3. JWT validation and API key management
  4. Response caching with TTLs and manual invalidation
  5. 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

  1. Dynamic checklist templates loaded from the server
  2. Photo capture with on-image annotation
  3. Local-first storage with background sync and conflict handling
  4. Signature capture and PDF report export
  5. 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

  1. Scan, connect, and auto-reconnect to the device
  2. A custom GATT service and characteristics that you define
  3. Live charts of incoming readings
  4. Local history with CSV export
  5. Write settings like sample rate and thresholds back to the device

Bonus: Firmware updates delivered over Bluetooth straight from the app.

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

  1. Authoritative server running at a fixed tick rate
  2. Client-side prediction with server reconciliation
  3. Entity interpolation for other players
  4. Lobby and simple matchmaking
  5. 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

  1. Seeded dungeon generation using BSP or cellular automata
  2. Entity-component-system architecture for all game objects
  3. Field of view and A* pathfinding for enemies
  4. Items, inventory, and save/load
  5. A playable web build published on itch.io

Bonus: A daily seeded challenge where everyone plays the same dungeon.