Project Roulette / Projects

Frontend, Systems and Games projects

9 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.

Systems · Advanced · 2–3 weeks

LSM-Tree Key-Value Store

A persistent key-value database built from scratch with a write-ahead log, memtable, SSTables, and compaction, like a tiny RocksDB.

  • Rust or C++
  • TCP
  • criterion / Google Benchmark

Features

  1. Write-ahead log with crash recovery
  2. Memtable flushed to sorted SSTable files
  3. Bloom filters to skip unnecessary disk reads
  4. Background compaction
  5. Simple TCP protocol with a CLI client

Bonus: Benchmarks against SQLite with throughput and latency graphs in the README.

Systems · Advanced · 2–3 weeks

RISC-V Emulator with Debugger

An RV32I CPU emulator that runs real programs compiled with GCC, plus a step debugger for registers and memory.

  • C++ or Rust
  • RISC-V GCC toolchain
  • SDL2 (optional)

Features

  1. Fetch, decode, and execute for the full RV32I instruction set
  2. ELF loader for compiled binaries
  3. Memory-mapped UART so programs can print
  4. Step debugger with register and memory views
  5. Passes the official riscv-tests suite

Bonus: A 5-stage pipeline view that visualizes hazards, stalls, and forwarding cycle by cycle.

Systems · Advanced · 2–3 weeks

Mini Container Runtime

Your own version of docker run, built from scratch: isolated processes with their own filesystem, process tree, network, and resource limits.

  • Go or C
  • Linux namespaces
  • cgroups v2
  • OverlayFS

Features

  1. PID, mount, UTS, and network namespaces
  2. Root filesystem set up with pivot_root from an image tarball
  3. CPU and memory limits using cgroups v2
  4. Layered filesystems with OverlayFS
  5. veth networking so containers can reach the internet

Bonus: Pull and run real images from Docker Hub by implementing the registry API.

Systems · Advanced · 2–3 weeks

Compiler for a Small Language

A compiler for your own small language, with variables, functions, loops, and structs, that outputs WebAssembly or x86-64 assembly and runs real programs.

  • Rust, C++, or OCaml
  • WebAssembly (WAT) or x86-64
  • A test harness

Features

  1. Hand-written lexer and recursive-descent parser
  2. Type checker with clear error messages that point at the source
  3. An intermediate representation with constant folding and dead-code elimination
  4. Code generation to WebAssembly or assembly
  5. Test suite of example programs with expected output

Bonus: A web playground that compiles and runs programs right in the browser.

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.