so, this isn't exactly what you are after; but, I've always had a bunch of little exercises and projects that I just kind of go through in a new language/platfo

so, this isn't exactly what you are after; but, I've always had a bunch of little exercises and projects that I just kind of go through in a new language/platform as a learning exercise. Examples: 1. given a large file, or set of files, write a program/routine to count the number of times an arbitrary sequence of characters appears. No regular expressions or other pattern matching helpers from a library/sdk, you have to do it all yourself. This one is pretty small, but there's lots of opportunity for optimization. 2. build a link shortener service with some analytics/tracking. 3. write a simple tokenizer for whatever syntax/language you feel like. JSON is a super easy one. 4. write a little website crawler. multithread it. implement rate limiting (something more advanced than random sleeps; e.g. token bucket, etc...). 5. make a couple easy data structures yourself. If the language/platform you are working in has the same structure in an SDK (or there's a good open source one), write yours to the same interface and then run it through their test suite. e.g. linked lists, queues, etc...