Ask HN: How to jump into "real world" programming?

Re:Ask HN: How to jump into "real world" programming? by Zev on Sunday December 27, 2009 @12:43AM (#1016765)

Changing sprintf to snprintf calls? Really? While useful and necessary, thats all busywork and rather dull to hack on. Certainly not something I would want to (or happen to be) work(ing) on during my current break. Possibly minus reading other peoples code (but that depends on what type of person you are).

But, "I read the $x's codebase" isn't exactly the sort of thing that one would put on a resume (which I think is the OP's goal). At most, something to mention in an interview; "oh, $y would be good to do here - I saw it used in $x's codebase and it works quite nicely."

My suggestion to the OP: Find a service you use fairly often and make some sort of an addon for it. Maybe analytics/graphs for relationships between people Twitter? Who knows, it should be something you find interesting.

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Re:Ask HN: How to jump into "real world" programming? by tomlogic on Sunday December 27, 2009 @04:11PM (#1017621)

The snprintf idea is a real-world example of something I worked on as part of a larger project. I took over maintenance of a poorly-written code base and cleaned up all sorts of problems. sprintf -> snprintf requires you to look through the code to figure out how big the buffer is, update the API to include new functions with buffer size parameters, determine whether buffers are large enough in the first place, etc. Something that can be dull, but can't be automated.

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