Chapter 6: Next Steps
If you're reading this, hopefully you just got done posting a bunch of inappropriate messages to your company's Slack hidden inside innocent cat pictures. I know that's the first thing I did.
So what's next? Here are a few suggestions.
If you want to keep working on this program
- Split your code up into a library and binary
- Add support for URL inputs and downloading images from the internet
- Add support for other file types
- Add an option to encrypt or obfuscate your hidden messages
- Figure out a way to automatically detect potential messages hidden in a PNG file
If you like playing with bytes
- Implement a CHIP-8 Interpreter
- This is the best next project IMO. If you're self-taught like me, you probably have a lot of little computer science knowledge gaps that you don't know about. You're basically making a CPU simulator here. You'll get exposure to a lot of things that most people don't normally encounter during their normal programming adventures.
- cryptopals
- Sort of like Project Euler for cryptography. No prerequisite knowledge required.
If you like implementing a spec
- Implement a CHIP-8 Interpreter
- For real, go do this.
- Advent of Code 2019 has a really fun sequence of challenges that have you build your own little code interpreter.
- This is more of a guided experience than diving into CHIP-8 if that's your thing
- Implement PNG image decoding
- Good luck