[dustinandband]

What kind of projects have you guys done to keep an interest in programming (outside of sourcepawn)? I'm finding I can work with sourcepawn cause I enjoy making mods for games but trying to make a calculator or notepad program in c++ comes off as boring. Trying to find something interesting to work with seems just as much a challenge as learning the actual language ;d

[nosoop]

See if there's some tooling that you use that you want to improve or something you've wanted to learn about. Maybe you have an older tool that you wrote back when you were new to a language; take the time to write it in an idiomatic fashion.

In no particular order, here's a number of non-plugin/extension projects that I've made to varying stages of (in)completion:

• A port of Asherkin's vtable dumper to Python for automation
• Leveraged a framework to create my own Steam WebAPI-style HTTP service complete with JSON and VDF output, which I use for my site and game server (and ported PHP code from the original iteration to Python). It also has a webhook that pulls in commits from its git repository and tests them as a home-grown CI setup.
• Script that pulls workshop maps off a collection and puts it in a mapcycle, mailing me if a map name has changed for updates, so I can manually curate navigation meshes
• A web-based game community server browser, before teamwork.tf / vanilla.tf existed
• Service that records Salty Bet matches and saves recordings of upsets (computerized fighter beating high betting odds)
• Script that converts a subset of game translations to SourceMod format
• Bot that watches a marketplace for items that I would be interested in
• Bot that would log in and collect my daily bank interest in Neopets
• A server that simulates the SourceMod gamedata updater service, being able to return third-party gamedata that isn't officially supported
• Script that generates a TF2 attributes table, since OPTF2 doesn't exist anymore
• Script that parses SourcePawn code (using a parsing library) and dumps a syntax tree; goal is to make a static docgen
• Script that archives saved posts from reddit into a database because they only show a maximum of ~920 posts
• An API that grabs leaderboard / replay data for Crypt of the NecroDancer
• A clone of Crypt of the NecroDancer (which ended up being a reminder that I'm not really motivated to be a game dev)
• A WebExtension to automatically activate existing tabs for a URL (frequently I open up a tab, navigate around, and end up on a page that is already open in another one, repeat it enough times and you have tons of duplicates)
• Script that points the Source Engine's filesystem to existing files, enabling me to create a "fresh" server in seconds
• Additional script that installs / upgrades SourceMod (and a number of other extensions) without overwriting settings
• Script that shuts off my monitors / sets me to Away on Steam when I lock my Windows desktop
• Custom client for a proprietary chat service

[Psyk0tik]

I've only done a few outside of SourcePawn so far. (Btw, SourcePawn is my first programming language.)

1. Simple C++ projects
- Created an advanced Statistics calculator. (incomplete because I can't math.)
- Written 2 to-do list programs. (1 using structs and arrays and 1 using a class, but both function identically.)
- Made a simple Hangman game. (I got bored of being bored, okay?)

2. Discord bots
- Programmed a bot that can send commands to my L4D/L4D2 servers hosted at home using RCON so I can manage them while out of the house.
- Wrote a simple bot that relays in-game reports to all online admins for a TF2 community that I work for.
- Improved an existing relay bot that allows for cross-platform communication between Steam and Discord. (only mentioning this one because I actually learned a lot during my tweaking.)

[dustinandband]

If someone would like to help me with this idea my discord is dustin#9028
I'm a beginner at python but it would be fun experience for me. (Maybe not for the guy helping me )

Spoiler

server synchronization software

Goals:
	Same as this user:
	https://superuser.com/questions/921189/using-git-to-sync-between-servers
	
	-Automate synchronizing, so any future updates to multiple servers can be done by uploading to a single github repository.
	-The update check would be a script that launches before the server is launched. (The server goes offline every 40 minutes if empty, or when everyone disconnects, and gets relaunched within a minute by a cron job / shell script.)
	
	Additional needs:
		-Ignore certain files / folders. 
			E.g. cfg/server.cfg is different for each server (though I'd still want it in the github repository for ease of deploying new servers).
		
		-If I delete something in the github repository - need the program to notice that and remove that file from the remote server.
			(sometimes certain plugins get renamed or need to be moved / removed.)
		
	Tricky:
		-Software should notice if local file differs from github file - and favor the github one.
			* After auto-updates (with '-validate' parameter), valve automatically overwrites default files that have been edited (such as whitelist.cfg).
			* Also, plugins with the same name might get updated. CFG configuration files might change, etc.
			(I imagine a simple date check to see when a file was last modified or uploaded could help with the logic in this feature. Might even be the solution)