Overflow bug hunt: write an 8-bit signed-integer simulator (Ch. 1)
and find the exact input that wraps from 127 to -128.
Percentile dashboard: given a CSV of latency samples, compute and
plot p50/p95/p99 vs. the mean, and explain the gap (Ch. 9).
Toy PageRank: build a 6-node link graph and compute the dominant
eigenvector by hand and with numpy.linalg.eig (Ch. 11).
Backprop by hand: extend the 2-layer worked example in Ch. 21 to 3
layers and verify your hand-derivative against PyTorch's autograd.
Base-rate simulator: build the IDS false-positive simulation from
Ch. 16 and plot precision as the base rate varies from 1-in-10 to
1-in-1,000,000.
Toy RSA: implement full key generation, encryption, and decryption
with 200-bit primes (using a primality-testing library), and time how
long factoring n takes vs. key size.
M/M/1 capacity planner: simulate a request queue at increasing
utilization and reproduce the hyperbolic wait-time curve from Ch. 25.
PID autoscaler: simulate a service under bursty load and tune a PID
controller to scale replica count without oscillating (Ch. 29).
