Project Roulette / Projects

Frontend, DevOps & Cloud, Security and Games projects

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

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

  1. 8–10 components with full keyboard support and correct ARIA roles
  2. Light and dark theming driven by design tokens
  3. Docs site with a live props playground for each component
  4. Automated accessibility tests that run in CI on every pull request
  5. 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

  1. Fetch and cache commit history with pagination and rate-limit handling
  2. Animated treemap playback with a timeline scrubber
  3. Contributor timeline and a churn heatmap of hot-spot files
  4. Heavy parsing moved into a Web Worker to keep animation smooth
  5. 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

  1. Drag-and-drop gates, switches, clocks, LEDs, and seven-segment displays
  2. Event-driven simulation with propagation delay
  3. Truth-table generator for any selected circuit
  4. Reusable custom components built from sub-circuits
  5. Save, load, and share circuits by link

Bonus: A waveform timing-diagram viewer that works like a logic analyzer for any wire you probe.

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

  1. Infrastructure as code for all VMs or cloud instances
  2. CI pipeline that builds, scans, and pushes container images
  3. Argo CD auto-sync from a Git repository
  4. Grafana dashboards and alert rules
  5. 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

  1. Three services in two languages, instrumented with OpenTelemetry
  2. Trace context carried through HTTP calls and a message queue
  3. Dashboards for rate, errors, and duration
  4. Logs linked to their trace IDs
  5. 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

  1. Direct uploads using presigned URLs
  2. S3 events feeding SQS and Lambda, with retries and a dead-letter queue
  3. Thumbnails and metadata stored in DynamoDB
  4. Least-privilege IAM roles for every function
  5. 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.

Security · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks

Git Secrets Scanner & GitHub Action

A CLI and GitHub Action that scans repositories, including full commit history, for leaked API keys, passwords, and private keys.

  • Go
  • Regex + entropy analysis
  • GitHub Actions
  • SARIF

Features

  1. Pattern and entropy-based secret detection
  2. Fast scanning of the full Git history
  3. Allowlist file to suppress false positives
  4. SARIF output that shows up in GitHub code scanning
  5. Pre-commit hook mode that blocks leaks before they happen

Bonus: A seeded test corpus that reports precision and recall, compared against an existing open-source scanner.

Security · Intermediate · 1–2 weeks

SSH Honeypot with Attack Dashboard

A fake SSH server on a cheap cloud VM that records the logins and commands real attackers try, shown on a live dashboard.

  • Python (asyncssh) or Go
  • Docker
  • PostgreSQL
  • Grafana
  • GeoLite2

Features

  1. Fake shell that imitates a Linux machine and logs every command
  2. Analytics on the most common passwords and commands
  3. World map of where attempts come from
  4. Strong isolation: its own VM, a container, and no outbound network
  5. Automatically generated weekly threat summary

Bonus: A write-up analyzing one week of real attack data, published alongside the repo.

Security · Advanced · 2 weeks

End-to-End Encrypted File Sharing

Share files by link, with encryption done in the browser so the server never sees file contents or keys.

  • TypeScript
  • Web Crypto API
  • Node.js or Go
  • S3-compatible storage

Features

  1. AES-GCM encryption in the browser, with the key kept only in the URL fragment
  2. Chunked streaming encryption for large files
  3. Links that expire or stop after a set number of downloads
  4. Optional password protection with proper key derivation
  5. A written threat model in the README

Bonus: A verification page that shows the stored ciphertext is unreadable without the link.

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.