Rotate the Grid

I’m not immersed in higher mathematics, therefore most of my programming puzzles tend to involve strings or other items I can easily comprehend. Beyond manipulating characters and strings, for my programming kung fu training I keep returning to the matrix or grid.
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Take it to the Limit

It’s been a while since I’ve been seriously concerned about wasting system resources. Back when I programmed a TRS-80 Model III with only 48K of RAM, keeping an eye on memory usage was vital. Today, not so much. In fact, if you desire to write code that consumes a lot of memory, CPU time, or other system resources, more power to you!
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Write Your Own Integer Conversion

It’s not that programmers are lazy. Many professions involve a lot of copy-and-paste, borrowing stuff done before, re-purposing and re-using. Why re-invent the wheel? Still, doing so helps exercise your programming kung-fu as well as offers insights into how things work and why some operations are done the way they are.

As an example, consider the atoi() function.
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