Amazing book. Very readable. I highly recommend it. The book has a section call "War story" at the end of each chapter in which Skiena shares his real life experience of when the contents from that particular chapter came in handy for him.
Actually Linus studied the heck out of other codebases. For example, linux itself was inspired by UNIX and it is said that he studied MINIX (minified version of UNIX used for teaching) before he started developing linux.
Vue is much easier in that sense. You can just import the library using <script src"<<vue cdn addr>>"></script> and you can start using vue right there.
In graphics, you can try some visual effect projects. What about morphing one 3d model into another? For example: given a 3d model or a man and the target of, let's say lion; the system should produce the fluid transform from a man to the lion. You can even package it into a simple easy to use product maybe a SAAS product and earn some money with it.
https://www.infoq.com/
https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability
https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/
https://research.ibm.com/publications