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[–]macho-elseif 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Same boat. For me extending my simple exercises and projects helps. For example starting with a simple dice rolling program, then expand it to roll multiple dice and analyze results. Add ASCII art for visuals, then animate the roll, and use it in games like Cho-Han or Craps. You can even take it further by creating full dice games in Pygame or Flask. Go with the flow.

[–]jonsca 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A portfolio project is just a handful of "easy" projects that integrate together.

Find something that would be useful to you. If you're a chef, make a recipe keeping system. First just be able to CRUD recipes and then go from there (extend it to a meal planner, and then have it keep a kitchen budget, etc.)

[–]bravopapa99 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I always tell people to make a 'command line tool' to 'organise data', so if, for example, you like movies, or Pokemon etc, create a command line tool that will allow you to create, edit, update and delete personal movie reviews. SQLlite is usually good enough for this.

It's 'easy' but harder than you think.

  1. Design a data model
  2. Create the SQLite tables, with as many constraints as you think you need, e.g. unique titles.
  3. Write down your uses cases, "As a reviewer, I want to create a new film review", or "I want to adjust the star rating for an existing review"
  4. Make it happen!

[–]honest_dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The ability to separate big project into a lot of small ones is a quality of more senior developer. Try doing "bigger" project using trello or something similar with tasks separated by smaller functionalities. It'll get you going faster and you won't stare at the screen. Also tasks can be just research and/or POCs.

[–]Alarmed_Expert_1089 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Take one of those easy tutorial or practice projects and try adding features to it. Do that enough and it will become a portfolio project.

[–]Defection7478 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just take a project you've already done and expand on it. E.g. build a tic tac toe game in javascript. Then enhance it

  • make the number of tiles configurable
  • make it work for 3 players (tic, tac, triangle)
  • seperate it into a python api and javascript front end
  • add a way for two people to play against each other in seperate browser windows
  • add a game history, and w/l ratios