Project Ideas

A curated list of projects for NST students. Some are standalone applications, others are designed to run on the compute cluster. Pick one that matches your interest and skill level — or propose your own.

Web Applications and Tools

Email Service

Build a self-hosted email system. Understand SMTP, IMAP, DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM), spam filtering, and mailbox storage. Harder than it sounds.

Medium Clone (Blog Platform)

A full-stack blogging platform with rich text editing, user accounts, comments, and a recommendation feed. Good exercise in content management, authentication, and full-text search.

Online Code Judge

Accept code submissions, run them in sandboxed containers against test cases, and return results. Requires container isolation, time/memory limits, and queue management. A natural fit for the cluster.

API Testing Tool (Postman-lite)

A browser-based tool for constructing and sending HTTP requests, viewing responses, organizing collections, and sharing them. Think Postman but lighter and self-hosted.

URL Monitoring and Uptime Checker

A service that periodically pings URLs and tracks uptime, response time, and status codes. Sends alerts on downtime. Good for learning about scheduling, notifications, and time-series data.

Code Screenshot Generator

Paste code, get a styled image. Syntax highlighting, theme selection, font options, export as PNG/SVG. Think Carbon or Ray.so.

Markdown-to-Slides Generator

Write slides in Markdown, present them in the browser. Transitions, themes, speaker notes, export to PDF.

Static Site Generator with Markdown

Build a tool that takes a directory of Markdown files and produces a static website. Templating, asset pipeline, live reload during development.

Web-based Database GUI

Connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB through a browser UI. Browse tables, run queries, view results, export data.

Draw DB Clone

A browser-based database schema designer. Drag-and-drop tables, define relationships, export as SQL DDL or ERD diagrams.

Web-based File Diff and Merge Tool

Upload or paste two files, see a side-by-side diff, resolve conflicts, and merge. Useful for understanding diff algorithms.

Host Terminal on Web

A web-based terminal emulator that connects to a server via WebSocket. Think xterm.js with a backend shell session.

File Manager for the Web

Browse, upload, download, rename, and organize files through a web UI. Think a simplified version of Finder or Nautilus in the browser.

Creative and Visual

Excalidraw-like Drawing App

A collaborative whiteboard with hand-drawn style shapes. Real-time sync between users, export as PNG/SVG.

SVG Waves

A generator for decorative SVG wave patterns. Customizable colors, layers, amplitude, and frequency. Export as SVG or CSS.

Coolors.co Clone

A color palette generator. Lock colors you like, generate complementary ones, export palettes, extract colors from images.

Gradient Generator

Create CSS gradients visually. Linear, radial, conic. Multiple stops, angle control, copy CSS output.

Photo Booth

Capture images from the webcam, apply filters (grayscale, sepia, blur, contrast), crop, and export. All in the browser using Canvas API.

SVG Animator

A tool for creating SVG animations visually. Keyframes, easing functions, path animation, timeline editor, export as animated SVG or CSS.

Procedurally Generated Landforms (2D and 3D)

Use noise functions (Perlin, Simplex) to generate terrain. Render in 2D as maps or in 3D using WebGL/Three.js. Adjustable parameters for mountains, valleys, rivers.

particles.js-like Fun Library

A JavaScript library for creating particle effects. Configurable physics, interactions, and rendering. Publish as an npm package.

p5.js-like Looping Renderer

A DOM-based creative coding framework with a setup() and draw() loop. Focus on programmatic animations without Canvas — pure DOM manipulation.

Music Generator

Algorithmic music generation. Define rules for melody, harmony, and rhythm. Output MIDI or audio. Web Audio API for real-time playback.

Music Programming Language

Design a DSL (domain-specific language) for composing music. Parse it, generate audio. Think Sonic Pi but as a language you design from scratch.

GUI Toolkit for Web (like dat.gui)

A lightweight JavaScript library for creating control panels. Sliders, color pickers, toggles, folders. Useful for creative coding and demos.

Games

Tetris

The classic. Implement it properly: rotation system, wall kicks, scoring, levels, and increasing speed. Browser-based.

Pokemon Game (Open World)

A 2D open-world game with Pokemon-style mechanics. Tile-based maps, NPC interactions, turn-based battles, inventory system.

Shasn The Game

A digital adaptation of the political strategy board game. Multiplayer, game state management, and rule enforcement.

Mario Platformer

A side-scrolling platformer with physics, level design, enemies, and power-ups. Good exercise in game loops, collision detection, and sprite animation.

System-Level and Hardware

VPN Service

Build a VPN server and client. Understand tunneling protocols, encryption, routing, and network namespaces.

Video Optimization Pipeline

A service that accepts video uploads, transcodes them to multiple resolutions and formats, generates thumbnails, and serves them via adaptive streaming (HLS/DASH).

Image Optimizer

Upload images, automatically compress and resize them for web delivery. Support WebP/AVIF output, batch processing, API access.

Rufus-like Disk Image Writer

A tool for writing OS images to USB drives. Cross-platform, with verification, progress tracking, and partition management.

Gesture-Based Computer Control

Use a webcam to detect hand gestures and translate them into mouse movements, clicks, and keyboard shortcuts. OpenCV or MediaPipe.

Gesture-Based Home Automation

Extend gesture detection to control IoT devices. Integrate with smart home protocols (MQTT, Zigbee).

Anydesk Clone

A remote desktop application. Screen capture, input forwarding, low-latency streaming. Understanding of video codecs, networking, and NAT traversal.

Custom Linux Desktop Environment

Build a window manager and desktop shell from scratch on Linux. Window placement, taskbar, application launcher, wallpaper, notifications.

Operating System

Write a minimal OS from scratch. Bootloader, kernel, memory management, process scheduling, filesystem, shell. Start with x86 or RISC-V.

Offline-First Notes App

A note-taking app that works without internet. Sync when connectivity returns. Conflict resolution, CRDTs or operational transforms.

Image-Based Plant Disease Detection

Train a model to identify plant diseases from leaf photos. Mobile-friendly UI for farmers. Model training, image preprocessing, deployment as an API.

TinkerCad Clone

A browser-based 3D modeling tool. Primitive shapes, boolean operations, export as STL for 3D printing. WebGL rendering.

Farm Automation

Sensor monitoring (soil moisture, temperature, humidity), automated irrigation, data logging, dashboard. Combines hardware (Arduino/Pi) with backend systems.

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Network

Implement a BitTorrent-like protocol. File chunking, peer discovery, distributed hash table, piece verification.

Automatic Inclination Detection / Auto Drive Assist

Detect road inclination using sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope) and assist driving decisions. Hardware + software integration.

Quick Recipes from Fridge Items

Photograph the contents of your fridge, identify ingredients (computer vision), and suggest recipes. API integration with recipe databases.

HL System Design Simulator

A visual tool for designing and simulating distributed systems. Draw components (load balancers, databases, caches, queues), simulate traffic, observe behavior under load and failure.

Browser-Based OS Simulator

Simulate an operating system in the browser. Process management, filesystem, terminal, windowed applications. Educational tool for OS concepts.

NST Forum

A campus-wide discussion forum. Categories, threads, voting, moderation, user profiles. The NST equivalent of a Stack Overflow or Discourse instance.

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Projects for the Compute Cluster

These are specifically designed to run on and take advantage of the NST Compute Cluster infrastructure.

Mini Cloud Platform

Not a UI. Not a deploy tool. An actual cloud platform — think a simplified AWS.

The hard questions you will need to answer:

• How do you isolate users from each other?
• How do you enforce resource quotas?
• How do you manage multi-tenancy?
• How do you expose apps to the internet safely?
• How do you handle node failures?
• What does "platform" even mean at the infrastructure level?

This is a capstone-level project. It touches every layer of the stack: networking, storage, compute, security, and API design.

Self-Service App Hosting Portal

Think Vercel, but built by you, running on the cluster.

A frontend and API that lets users:

• Deploy apps from Git repositories
• Review deployments before promoting them
• Roll back to previous versions
• View logs and metrics
• Audit who changed what and when

Distributed Job Queue and Worker System

A system for submitting long-running tasks (video processing, ML training, data crunching) and distributing them across cluster nodes. Job prioritization, retries, progress tracking, and result collection.

Fault-Tolerant Key-Value Store

Build a distributed key-value store (like a simplified Redis cluster). Data replication across nodes, consistency guarantees, failure detection, automatic failover.

Requires understanding of: consensus algorithms (Raft), replication, partitioning, and network failures.

Distributed Configuration and Secrets System

A centralized service for storing and distributing configuration and secrets to applications. Versioning, access control, encryption at rest, change notifications.

Cluster-Wide Scheduler

Build a simplified version of the Kubernetes scheduler. Accept workload definitions, decide which node to place them on based on resource availability and constraints, handle node failures.

Internal Developer Platform

A unified portal for all developer tools and services. User management, project creation, resource provisioning, documentation hosting. Think Backstage or a simplified Salesforce/Odoo for developers.

Platform Observability Stack

Build a complete monitoring system:

• Metrics: Collect and store time-series data (CPU, memory, request rates)
• Logs: Aggregate logs from all pods and services
• Traces: Track requests across services

Dashboards, alerting, and anomaly detection.

CI/CD System

A continuous integration and delivery pipeline that:

1. Watches Git repositories for changes
2. Runs tests in isolated containers
3. Builds container images
4. Pushes to the cluster registry
5. Deploys to staging and production environments

Event Streaming Platform (Kafka-lite)

A distributed message broker for event-driven architectures. Topics, partitions, consumer groups, replay, exactly-once delivery. Simpler than Kafka, but distributed across cluster nodes.

Distributed File Storage System (S3-like)

An object storage service running across cluster nodes. Upload files via API, store them distributed across nodes with replication, retrieve by key. Versioning, access control, and metadata.

Batch Processing Engine (MapReduce-like)

Submit large data processing jobs that get split across cluster nodes, processed in parallel, and results aggregated. The classic MapReduce pattern, implemented on your own infrastructure.

Real-Time Collaborative Editor

Like Google Docs or Google Sheets, but self-hosted. Multiple users editing the same document simultaneously. Operational transforms or CRDTs for conflict resolution, WebSocket for real-time sync.

Multiplayer Game Server

A scalable game server infrastructure. Lobby management, matchmaking, game state synchronization, low-latency networking. Can host the Minecraft server or custom games built by other students.

Network Chaos and Failure Simulation Tool

A tool for intentionally breaking things: inject network latency, drop packets, kill pods, simulate node failures. Used to test how other applications handle failures. Think Chaos Monkey for the NST cluster.

System Debugging and Recovery Simulator

An educational tool that presents broken system scenarios (misconfigured networks, crashed services, full disks, certificate expiration) and lets students diagnose and fix them in a safe environment.

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Special Project

Configure and create an NST Overleaf Image — a custom Overleaf Docker image tailored for NST, with pre-installed LaTeX packages, templates, and branding.

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Pick something. Build it. Ship it on the cluster. That is how you learn.