Frontend · Intermediate · 2 weeks
Accessible Design System & Component Library
A themeable library of accessible UI components (dialog, combobox, tabs, data table, toast) published to npm, with a documentation site where people can try every component live.
- React
- TypeScript
- Storybook
- Vitest
- Testing Library
- axe-core
Features
- 8–10 components with full keyboard support and correct ARIA roles
- Light and dark theming driven by design tokens
- Docs site with a live props playground for each component
- Automated accessibility tests that run in CI on every pull request
- Versioned releases to npm with a generated changelog
Bonus: Visual regression testing with Playwright screenshots that block a PR if any component changes unexpectedly.
Frontend · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Git Repo Time-Lapse Visualizer
Paste any public GitHub repository and watch its file tree grow over time as an animated treemap, with contributor activity and the files that change most often.
- TypeScript
- Vite
- D3.js
- GitHub REST API
- Web Workers
Features
- Fetch and cache commit history with pagination and rate-limit handling
- Animated treemap playback with a timeline scrubber
- Contributor timeline and a churn heatmap of hot-spot files
- Heavy parsing moved into a Web Worker to keep animation smooth
- Shareable URLs that encode the repo and timestamp
Bonus: Export the playback as a WebM or GIF that people can drop straight into their own README.
Frontend · Intermediate · 2 weeks
Browser Logic Circuit Simulator
Drag gates, wires, clocks, and LEDs onto a canvas and watch signals propagate in real time. Build anything from a half adder to a tiny CPU in the browser.
- TypeScript
- Canvas 2D or SVG
- Vite
- Web Workers
- Vitest
Features
- Drag-and-drop gates, switches, clocks, LEDs, and seven-segment displays
- Event-driven simulation with propagation delay
- Truth-table generator for any selected circuit
- Reusable custom components built from sub-circuits
- Save, load, and share circuits by link
Bonus: A waveform timing-diagram viewer that works like a logic analyzer for any wire you probe.
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.
DevOps & Cloud · Advanced · 2–3 weeks
GitOps Kubernetes Home Lab
A fully automated Kubernetes cluster where pushing to Git builds, scans, and deploys your apps, with monitoring and alerts built in.
- Terraform
- k3s
- Argo CD
- Helm
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- GitHub Actions
Features
- Infrastructure as code for all VMs or cloud instances
- CI pipeline that builds, scans, and pushes container images
- Argo CD auto-sync from a Git repository
- Grafana dashboards and alert rules
- Secrets managed safely with Sealed Secrets
Bonus: Canary rollouts that roll back automatically when the error rate spikes.
DevOps & Cloud · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Distributed Tracing Playground
Three small microservices instrumented end to end, so you can follow a single request across every service with linked logs, metrics, and traces.
- OpenTelemetry
- Docker Compose
- Jaeger or Tempo
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Loki
Features
- Three services in two languages, instrumented with OpenTelemetry
- Trace context carried through HTTP calls and a message queue
- Dashboards for rate, errors, and duration
- Logs linked to their trace IDs
- SLOs with burn-rate alerts
Bonus: A fault-injection switch that adds latency or errors so viewers can see exactly how problems show up.
DevOps & Cloud · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks
Serverless Media Pipeline on AWS
Upload an image or video and an event-driven pipeline resizes, transcodes, and tags it automatically. All infrastructure is defined in code.
- AWS S3, Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB
- AWS CDK or Terraform
- TypeScript or Python
- GitHub Actions
Features
- Direct uploads using presigned URLs
- S3 events feeding SQS and Lambda, with retries and a dead-letter queue
- Thumbnails and metadata stored in DynamoDB
- Least-privilege IAM roles for every function
- CI/CD that deploys separate dev and prod stages on merge
Bonus: A cost report in the README showing the real cost per 1,000 uploads.
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.