I had a problem that will sound familiar. I kept starting big projects and finishing none of them. A huge idea on Monday, an empty repo by Friday. The green squares on my contribution graph stayed empty, and nothing I had built was something I could show anyone.

So I changed the rule. Instead of one big thing, I would build one small real program every day. Alternating days: one day C++, one day Python. One commit a day, no filler commits, no empty files. Every program has to actually work and be something a person could use.

That became two repos. cpp-foundry for the C++ days, py-foundry for the Python days.

The C++ days

Day one was a grade calculator. You enter your courses with credits and marks, and it prints each course with its grade points and your semester average.

Day three was Two Sum, the classic interview problem. Given an array of numbers and a target, find the two numbers that add up to the target and return their positions. I solved it in one pass with a hash map.…