I think this touches on something important - rather than writing from scratch some asinine limited use case software, make useful software. You can prove your

I think this touches on something important - rather than writing from scratch some asinine limited use case software, make useful software. You can prove your worth in the useful products you produce, not in the bravado you accrue saying you wrote a compiler from scratch - it is the difference between using a dozen programs a day that I know I've commited patches to and seeing the fruits of your labor or having your standards compliant C++11 compiler rot in some directory on your PC while you still use clang/gcc because the program said you can't even put it in a public git repo and instead of spending 10k lines improving the current best of the crop you reinvented the wheel as a stone brick while major players are comparing rubber treads.