Meme altcoins are pretty ridiculous, and I couldn't help but notice the storm-in-a-teacup that was the Coinye West launch (currency symbol COYE, a parody altcoin named after Kanye West). I'm not sure if there is a better time to learn about hacking on altcoin daemons!
Bitcoind and its forks expose a JSON-RPC server enabling API wallet management and account balance calculations. My vision was to allow Coinye miners to vote for their favourite Kanye West songs by sending coins to specific Coinye addresses. I hacked up a small Python script to create a Coinye address for each of Kayne West's music tracks and to generate a static web page listing the current voting scores.
Source at:
https://github.com/brotchie/coinyesbest
https://github.com/brotchie/coinyesbest/tree/doge
Resulting static page at:
http://coinyesbest.com/
My primary findings after wasting time on this: There is a gap in open source tools to parse altcoin block chains and calculate the current balance of any given address.