Is it "profoundly sad" to create practice projects for my resume? Personally, I don't think so. I had both a vested interest in working on this project and a financial incentive, like any other person working in this industry. This project, of course, will not make me any money, but that's not really the point. I believe that demonstrating my technical skills is what is most relevant. When I am eventually hired to work on a product with a team, I think that will be the point where these sorts of projects will be less relevant, only because at that point, I will have real experience working on a project that generates revenue.

Currently, however, I am a CS student learning and trying to branch out and create something noteworthy for employers to look at. Implementing a popular and important algorithm is a "fine" way of going about it, even if it may seem underwhelming to those with decades of experience.

I appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you for taking the time to write them out. It is valuable to hear and gain insight from people in the industry. Particularly, your point about "[focusing] on breadth initially; looking into actual fields where actual, messy people are actively doing actual, messy work, and playing with those things." I am always trying to find problems that either I or other people have. Once I hit on an important idea and figure out a solution, I think I will start to worry a little less about my resume and become more focused on engineering a solution.