

Ask HN: (for a friend) Project tips for CS students? - Apocryphon

I'm asking on behalf of a friend, who says thus (paraphrased for the HN audience):<p>"Four of us Computer Science students are doing a Senior Design design class. We need to finish a complete project over 2 quarters. Only problem is the suggested projects seem uninteresting, and we can't think of anything exciting either. The sky is limit when it comes to projects, mobile, web, app, whatever we want we can do.<p>Please give us some project ideas! Oh and we'll do a combined 4 person tell-all about it when the project is over and done with!<p>2 have worked lightly in graphics, nothing very advanced, just light work with OpenGL, and know the Qt toolkit.
2 have built a DBMS from near scratch.
1 has work experience in social media.
2 have work experience in QA/QC.
1 studies econ.
1 has a more Comp Eng. background with computer architecture, circuits, etc.
1 is a rare CS girl :O<p>We've all finished most of our required classes, so we've touched things like OSes, algorithms, various programming languages, computer architecture.<p>On top of it all we rarely see sunlight... they like to keep us CS students in a dark dingy basement, with no wifi or cell phone reception."<p>Got any tips for them?
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stevejohnson
I usually either try to make something that could become a viable product, or
do something I could never get paid for in a million years but can work on for
a class.

First category: games, data mining tools, audio.

Second category: weird web apps, new programming languages, operating systems.

(I have done almost all of these and they all turned out well as projects.)

It's also nice to build something for your fellow students. Do the
extracurricular groups have good web presences? Is there some kind of odd
thing you can track and display? Could you pull off a massive prank and
integrate the project somehow?

Last thing: no matter what, do something that requires you to learn at least
one new skill.

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znt
2 people with DBMS and 1 person with social media experience would be suitable
for a project that analyzes Tweets using Streaming API. There's more data than
you can make use, getting pumped out of Twitter every second.

