The folks at cloud9 IDE or Codecademy are in a good position to collect and expose patterns in programming efficiency.
On one's own, simply using a VCS with a high enough commit frequency would let you infer something about lines added per hour. Perhaps an editor's undo stack could also be committed to store finer-grained metrics.
With detailed metrics and impressive data analysis there's the opportunity to uncover useful insights into how we debug and learn. That's probably more than a weekend project, but worth it in potential future payout IMO.
Turns out I'm already collecting this data… Vim has recently added a persistent undo feature (enable by setting 'undodir' and 'undofile'; 'undolevel' can also be raised from the default 1000); there is a Gundo plugin that displays the undo tree like a DVCS commit graph.
On one's own, simply using a VCS with a high enough commit frequency would let you infer something about lines added per hour. Perhaps an editor's undo stack could also be committed to store finer-grained metrics.
With detailed metrics and impressive data analysis there's the opportunity to uncover useful insights into how we debug and learn. That's probably more than a weekend project, but worth it in potential future payout IMO.