It helps to have a stock project or two that let you exercise I/O, data structures, standard library, benchmarking and so on. For me I have a couple: 1) A non

It helps to have a stock project or two that let you exercise I/O, data structures, standard library, benchmarking and so on. For me I have a couple: 1) A nonlexical phrase extractor. Read in a lexicon of words, read in a narrative document, subtract words from the lexicon from the document, collect all remaining strings with word length > 2. Voila, most of them will be names of people. 2) Build an on disk bloom filter. Pretty straightforward, the most complicated part is finding suitable hash functions and figuring out how the local mmap library works and working out the arithmetic for bit flipping amongst a big array of bytes. Neither of these are very complicated or require lots of work to set up. But when you're done you'll know most of the operators, how to read in and write out things, how to interact with the standard library, control flow and so on. I can usually hammer both of these out in an afternoon. A few people I know have more advanced "simple" projects, like ones that require figuring out the local threading system, sockets and so on: e.g. write a simple web server. It kind of depends on what kind of work you generally do.