I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person that uses the x10 LOC as a way of judging a programmer's skills. I generally think of it like this:
10 = Sam's Learn Java in 24 hours
100 = did some programming courses at highschool / university
1000 = baseline professional programmer. Has already understood the
basics of writing reasonable code at the function level
10000 = experienced programmer - will stand out in a corporate
environment, probably the minimum that you want working
on a startup. Understands architectural issues and mastering
the environment outside the application
100000 = star programmer. That said, I don't see a big difference
between the last two categories in terms of pure programming
skills. The difference is more in that the 100000 LOC
programmer is capable of directing a team, explaining the
system architecture to others, making the code more
modularisable and accessible to others (doing the necessary
makefile magic so that code will compile as C or C++ for
example, or providing a plugin architecture, or adding bindings
for a scripting language etc)
To go back to the original question, if you find that you are limited to 1000 LOC programs, looking at the list, you need to look a bit more at architectural issues - encapsulation, OO, functional style programming, that sort of stuff, to get you to a level where your code won't descend into an unholy mess when it starts getting bigger.
I actually use the size of codebases written entirely by the candidate as an indicator in job interviews - it gives a good feeling of where the person is at.
I don't know about saying 1000 LOC is a baseline for a junior developer. I did second year software engineering last semester and our final project was about 1000 LOC. Granted, that was C, which tends to be... verbose. Even our python implementation of something similar averaged 450. Point is, I don't think 90% of the people in that class, myself included, could start as a junior developer today and be expected to succeed.
It's not clear in my original post, but I was talking explicitly about what a programmer can achieve by themself, without any aid from peers/mentors. I don't think your example contradicts that. How many of your classmates actually did the project by themself, without getting aid from tutors/lecturers, discussing ideas with classmates, etc? And even if they did, the problem still isn't directly comparable, because you've presumably been discussing the ideas that you are using in your projects during the course. The ideas are fresh in people's heads. This is not true in the real world, where you can be assigned to working on a project that uses skills that you haven't touched for years.
Anyhow, our discussion is a little theoretical. In practice, I can say that what I described is really truly what you find when you work in a large corporation writing code. I know it's hard to believe, but have a look around at the horror recruiting stories on this site, or stories talking about how enterprises do software development. It's not a pretty picture. It's not just that your baseline programmer can only write a project of about 1000 LOC, but also that there are a significant number of "developers" that can't even do that. Hard to believe, until you've seen it for yourself, but true nonetheless.
10 = Sam's Learn Java in 24 hours
100 = did some programming courses at highschool / university
1000 = baseline professional programmer. Has already understood the basics of writing reasonable code at the function level
10000 = experienced programmer - will stand out in a corporate environment, probably the minimum that you want working on a startup. Understands architectural issues and mastering the environment outside the application
100000 = star programmer. That said, I don't see a big difference between the last two categories in terms of pure programming skills. The difference is more in that the 100000 LOC programmer is capable of directing a team, explaining the system architecture to others, making the code more modularisable and accessible to others (doing the necessary makefile magic so that code will compile as C or C++ for example, or providing a plugin architecture, or adding bindings for a scripting language etc)
To go back to the original question, if you find that you are limited to 1000 LOC programs, looking at the list, you need to look a bit more at architectural issues - encapsulation, OO, functional style programming, that sort of stuff, to get you to a level where your code won't descend into an unholy mess when it starts getting bigger.
I actually use the size of codebases written entirely by the candidate as an indicator in job interviews - it gives a good feeling of where the person is at.