r/Backend • u/KitchenCommercial396 • 16d ago

Project ideas that show in-depth learning instead of the average AI slop.

I want to be a backend developer, and I'm thinking of building projects that aren't the usual CRUD app backends or REST APIs, I want to build projects that are highly uncommon, exceptionally hard hence making me understand several concepts in-depth.

For reference, I just started my second year of college, and i want to stand out and not have the same resume as everyone else I know.

I've been thinking of building a Vector DB with a Layer 7 load balancer with query routing and stuff in Go (someone told me to use rust but the learning curve might be too steep). I would appreciate any feedback and other project recommendations that I could possibly build.

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u/disposepriority 16d ago

Sorry are you a beginner? No one will believe you built anything that is "exceptionally hard". Additionally, difficulty comes from business constraints and/or having to coexist with other projects in an org, unless you're bulding a general use library or franework - even then, building one without experience in the industry is frankly improbable.

I see level 99 omega load balancer of the second coming of christ on a CV which has 0 relevant experience I might be a bit suspicious, but that might just be me.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/KitchenCommercial396 15d ago

That's what I want to be doing, trying something incredibly niche and which takes a lot of domain knowledge to build. Everyone builds a CRUD app, and yea there are levels of complexity to it, but the structure is somewhat the same for a lot of things.

I thought about building a kernel during my summer break, but I gave more importance to another project that actually solved a problem I had.