Me: Normally backend/data-processing stuff, senior level. My "hello world" project is almost always Conway's Game of Life, and I try pretty hard to follow the

Me: Normally backend/data-processing stuff, senior level. My "hello world" project is almost always Conway's Game of Life, and I try pretty hard to follow the idioms of the language when I do it. I like Conway's Game of Life because it's easy enough to not be too frustrating, but challenging enough to where you actually have to think about the problem a bit, at least if you're planning on following language idioms. Usually I just "render" to the command line, though occasionally I will get ambitious and figure out SDL or OpenGL bindings. Admittedly most of my projects involve servers in some way, so after I've done the Game of Life, I usually start playing with the networking libraries like ZeroMQ and the libraries to call command-line programs, and I make a distributed video processor using ffmpeg.