two coding projects that come to mind

A URL rewriter. You do a GET from it, and it munges the URL, fetches that, and returns the result. This is a generalization of "gee, I dislike a) clicking like a trained rat for successive chunks of the nytimes.com story, and also b) typing this pagewanted=all cruft onto the end of the URL." I started working on this as a learn-Python project a while back, but then I got sidetracked by my thesis. Python's standard library didn't seem to deal with cookies, so it all got more involved than I'd budgeted time for.

A plugin grouper. Takes a flow graph of VST plugins (or DX if you enjoy pain) and wraps them into a single plugin. Hides some parameters, exposes others, as specified. To start, maybe just define the grouping in a text file, XML maybe; later you can slap a UI on top.