One of the best ways to learn programming is to conceptualize and execute small, simple projects to hone your coding skills. To get the most out of your time and set yourself up for the greatest success, this blog post will explore some tips and suggest a few project ideas that can help you acquire skills aligning with your current interests and future career goals.
Tips for Success
To best equip you for success, here are a few things you may want to consider when picking and completing coding projects.
Start Small
Pick projects you can complete in an afternoon or a couple of days. For a larger project, try and break it down into smaller features that you would be able to complete in a short period to avoid getting bogged down.
For example, suppose you decide to create a project where you take a list of chores you have to do and receive a text message with a random chore. This project can be intuitively broken down into two parts: sending yourself a text and randomly picking a chore. You could then approach the project by solving each subproblem first and then integrating your solutions.
Version Control / Check-In Code
Version control software, like Git, allows you to maintain the history of all code changes and allows you to branch off of code to try different things without impacting a previous branch. This allows you to roll back to an older commit or branch that you know has working code, letting you experiment with solutions easily. For artists, this is equivalent to layers in art programs or saves for gamers.
Consider incrementally running your code so that you know that each component works, and check-in that code. Testing each component frequently as you go will help you out a lot in debugging since you can be more confident that your previous changes have been tested to narrow the amount of code you have to debug.
Document Frequently
Leave lots of comments for yourself so that you can always refer back and see what you were thinking as you were working on the project, and build a good habit of frequent documentation.
Beginner Coding Project Ideas
Picking projects that you want to make for yourself is the best kind of project. Think about things that you want to make, whether it is something related to your own personal branding for your career or something that you have a personal interest in such as game development, or tools that would help you automate recurring chores. A project you have a personal stake in will always be something you will have the most motivation towards, especially if it’s something you can share and be proud of having made it.
Following this line of thought, here are a few projects that you could consider to get some ideas flowing for beginner projects.
Personal “About Me” Website
Something simple, like a static website, can be hosted either for free or cheaply, such as GitHub Pages. A website has more flexibility to show off your creativity and skills than traditional resumes since you have fewer restrictions than say, a one or two-page document. This kind of project will help you explore concepts such as HTML, JS, and CSS, as well as navigate documentation to deploy something to the internet while also giving you a place to showcase your skills as they’re growing now and in the future.
Visual Novels
If you have an interest in writing or art, a simple open-source software development kit (SDK) like Ren’py can be a great way to learn programming in Python while also letting you create a game to express your creative side.
An idea could be something like a mystery detective game, where you have to pick up evidence to solve a mystery. This would let you explore concepts such as learning to use a SDK, conditional logic, and state management through data structures. Your project can also be packaged and shared so that other people can check out your project on multiple different operating systems.
A Discord Chatbot
With Discord’s development API, you can explore creating a bot that can handle special commands of your own design for your own personal use. This kind of project can help you explore concepts such as asynchronous APIs, handling user inputs, and concepts such as role-based access control if you need to make sure other people who may have access to your bot are only allowed to use commands that you want them to. Discord bots also follow a server-client architecture, so you will gain experience learning how to handle commands and serve the appropriate responses.
As with any API, please make sure to use the APIs as per any guidelines or agreements.
Go Code Something!
Coding projects are a great way to expand your programming skills. Keeping in mind some tips to position yourself for success and picking projects that you have a personal interest in implementing will help accelerate your learning adventure.
If you are new or just getting started with programming, TCM Security Academy offers a free course on programming fundamentals using Python that will give you an accelerated start with the core concepts and have you creating basic programs. This is a basic 3+ hour course that will give you the foundational knowledge to start your programming journey and tackle more advanced courses and projects.
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