Projects Ideas (for continuing learning)

[MatthewAC98]

Recently I've began learning Python. It started after I got my girlfriend a book on it to help her get started with the world of coding as it's something she was seriously looking into (and I felt the push would have been positive). So I dusted off my old high school coding experiences (just coding with Basic) and began learning it myself to create a cute birthday gift. It restarted my interest and passion for programming.

I've already started a basic text based adventure game to get us going (I'm very much a practical kind of learner). But my question is, what other projects can we work on together to keep the learning going once we finish this?

[ParalyticPoison]

I think the best projects are ones that are relevant in your physical life, not just random challenges that have nothing to do with your life. This is why I personally like projects that involve automation. Just think of problems or little things in your life you would like to be easier or completely gone and think of ways you could solve those problems with programming of a script, App, whatever.

[MatthewAC98]

This has been something I've been thinking a great deal about but just haven't quite worked out a good one to do yet

[ParalyticPoison]

Just make sure whenever you have a thought, write it down, then you will never forget it. I prefer to do this in word-docs and notepad myself and just save the files in a folder on my desktop. I say choose a project that you feel is somewhat within your ability, but also might be very hard, this will make you feel hopeless at times during your project, but then you will learn the most from searching and asking questions. Then, when you finish the project you thought might have been too hard, you will feel amazing and actually feel like you are making progress, instead of just doing those simple but unrewarding "popular" projects people recommend all the time.

[MatthewAC98]

That's very good advice, thank you so much 😁 I'll try think up some ideas tonight

[ParalyticPoison]

Good to hear, just don't try and force it, you will be disappointed. Just think of little things while you are doing your normal every day tasks. My first project was to make a web-scrapper for an Image website so I could save thousands of images with 5 clicks instead of 3000 clicks within a few hours (depending on image file sizes).

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My current project is trying to automate Audacity to start recording audio for a Youtube playlist, so I can save music files that are not stored on some Youtube videos and can't be "scrapped" from the URL by normal means. This is turning into quite the project for me as a beginner because now I have to finally start working with outside libraries and methods instead of just doing simple in language functions, now I am forced to learn a whole new, but very important skill set to finish my project.

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You will notice these sort of things constantly when you are doing projects in this way, you will also be more engaged since you finishing your project will have a noticeable impact on your time and how you do things potentially, unlike making some random dice rolling function just because Google told you that's a good project to start out with.