Programming Project Ideas: 3 ways for generating them.
Learning to code can be difficult and confusing, especially when you don’t even know where to start.
When I was starting out as a Django developer, I did not know what I should start developing, because everyone has an opinion, search for “Django project ideas” and I am sure you will be presented with hundreds of results, each one telling you the reason why it is the best.
But in reality, anything you build is a success.
One of the best ways to sharpen your programming skills is to work on side projects.
It does not matter what stack or programming language you use; this advice applies to all.
Starting a project that you want to work on and finishing it all the way through will be beneficial than starting something too complex and giving up along the way.
Disclaimer: This are tips that helped me, you are free to take any that resonate with you and discard the rest, but I am sure I am not the only one this has helped.
Also, I will be sharing some resources for Django Developer at the end of this article, kindly read through.
#1 Enroll for courses that build project:
The reason why this is used as the first one is because we all are learning from others in one way or the other. Watching someone build a project will give you the idea of what project development process looks like, and also developing your skill. I understand that there are several courses online, but kindly make a little bit effort to look into the review of any course you will be enrolling for, so it won’t be a waste of time.
And for those who prefer to read books to watching videos, you can look for books which follows a project based approach to what you are trying to learn.
#2 Solve a Problem:
As a programmer, what you are doing is solving problems. Look into your close environment, what problem are people facing, try using your knowledge to solve such problems.
e.g. My University Muslim Students’ Society organizes series of events for its member, during the cause of the events, attendants of the event has to register before entering the venue. This do result into congestion at the registration point (Problem 1) and also, the registration is done on paper (problem 2).
Solution: I developed a website that allows the attendants of the society’s events to register from the comfort of their home before getting to the venue of the event.
The details of all attendees are saved on the cloud, and for each events, the details can be automatically generated once it ended.
Look for problem people are facing within your close environment, solve the problem.
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#3 Automate Repetitive task:
Some years back, there is a website where I do download Lectures of Muslim Scholars, Muslim Central. The lectures are mostly playlist, and you have to download each lecture in the playlist one at a time. This seems like a repetitive task, therefore, I wrote a script that automatically handles the downloading once provided with the URL to the playlist.
Also, my first project for this year, is a Web application for automatically staging a WhatsApp referral contest.
On a normal day, to stage a referral contest, you have to write a message to make people aware of it, assign referral ID to each interested referral, write a broadcast for each referral with their unique referral ID, take count of contacts referred by each referral.
The website automate every process involved, one only has to create an account, and everything is good to go.
Look for task that you do which seems like a repetitive task, automate such tasks.
If you can follow the 3 tips above, I am sure of it, you will have various project ideas you can work on.
Feel free to make any necessary additions.
Thank you for reading.
Resources:
1. Django for Beginners: Learn web development with Django 2.0 by William S. Vincent
2. Django for Professionals: Production websites with Python & Django by William S. Vincent
3. Django for APIs: Build web APIs with Python and Django by William S. Vincent
4. Django 3 By Example: Build Powerful and Reliable Python Web Book by Antonio Mele
Videos:
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this write up Lawal Afeez