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Starter Project Ideas for Developers
A list of starter projects for new developers or experienced developers learning a new language. Each idea has a detailed description, examples, and suggestions that you can build your own unique idea off of. Think of it as programming challenges, but with projects instead of single challenges.
Note: I tailor the examples in this post for JavaScript developers, but the ideas can work for anyone regardless of programming language.
Getting your Feet Wet
Learning the basics with a focus on create, read, update, and delete operations (CRUD).
Name Generator
Naming things is hard, it seems like every username is taken these days… so how about we make the computer generate names for us? The idea is simple and should only require a basic knowledge of the programming language.
First, figure out what kinds of names you want to generate (usernames, fantasy, character names, normal names, etc) and the parts of those names.
// Types of names examples:[honorific/title] [name] of [location]
- Duke William of Cornwall
- President Wilson of Canada
[name] of [location]
- Solaire of Astora
[name] the [object noun] [title noun]
- Kyle the Chicken Slayer
[name] the [adjective]
[username or some combination of words][1-4 numbers]
- SomeName1234
- ChickenBob28// etc, you get the idea
After you have figured out what kinds of names to generate, you must think about how you want to store the data that contains the names, nouns, adjectives, titles, etc. This can be hard-coded, stored on the filesystem using a CSV or text file, pulled from an API, or stored in a database. If you’re just starting out, explore what data structures your language supports (objects, lists, arrays, hashmaps, etc) and experiment with those.
The final step is to randomly select keywords from your data, make some combination of them to create a name, and display it. This step is entirely up to you. You can display it as text output in a console, graphical interface, web browser, text file, or whatever.
Why build it:
This project is more advanced than a hello world but simpler or around the same difficulty…
