'I had always heard that building a word processor is one of the hardest things you can ever do as a software engineer.'

So says this guy.

That is probably a good test of a person's aptitude toward software engineering. If you can somehow look past the crushing and pointless dullness of developing yet another word processor and instead groove on the intrinsic challenge of the task, clearly you've found your spot in the world.

Increasingly I am more and more interested in having some kind of concrete (useful or fun) end result, which is why I've gravitated toward the hackerspace world of late.