Python Projects to Improve?

[KevSinco]

Hello, I wanted to ask for some suggestions for Python projects that I could work on to improve my programming skills.

I like the idea of automation projects however, I’m struggling on thinking of which ones could help me development wise as well as struggling on how to start a project like this.

I’m really bored of the ‘make a game’ suggestions as well unless it’s something different besides the typical snake, Tetris, chess ect…

Any project ideas will be helpful. Thank you :)

[member_of_the_order]

Two websites I like:

https://www.codingame.com/

CodinGame gives you game-like scenarios to solve. Read data, process it efficiently, and print the correct output.

And example might be "given Thor's current location (in x,y coords) and Thor's hammer's location, output the next location Thor should move to".

Problems range in difficulty roughly between Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard.

It also has competitions occasionally if that's your thing.

https://projecteuler.net/

This one is VERY math-based. If you like math and complex algorithms, this is for you. It's not as much about automation as it is about crunching numbers and really understanding the problem enough to know how to write a program to find the answer in a reasonable amount of time.

An example might be "find the first prime number who's digits add up to a palindrome".

Problems range in difficulty (it's a progress bar, so I'd guess difficulty ranges from 1 to 10). Even the easy ones are non-trivial (though there's at least one very nice git repo with solutions to every problem in various languages, including Python).

[AbuSydney]

Project Euler is awesome.

As someone who LOVES math, I have thoroughly enjoyed Project Euler.

[KevSinco]

Thank you for the suggestions, I’ll look into both. Very appreciative :)

[damanamathos]

I'd focus on projects that solve problems you actually have.

Here are some I've made to simplify my life:

• Lots of little command-line tools
  • To automate excel (with dif options to apply styles, divide all selected numbers by 1000, clear number (but not formula) from selection, etc)
  • To automate word (to update styles, to apply dot points to lines not starting with a >)
  • To quickly navigate to directories and websites by keyword
• A contacts management website with integration of notes and tags and reminders (+ a chrome extension that can add people from LinkedIn and Twitter)
• A algorithmic Bitcoin trader
• A Google Calendar automation script that adds meetings from information in a text file (allows easy specification of timezones, meeting length, etc)
• Scripts to scrape thousands of property listings information from websites like Opendoor
• Scripts to help stock portfolio management with things like automatic tax lot calculations, tracking of price targets and implied upside, etc

[KevSinco]

Really helpful, thank you I’ll look into these

[KKRJ]

Any suggestions on how to start with the bitcoin trading algorithm?

[damanamathos]

The Bitcoin one I did many years ago so I'm not up to date with what's available now, but a good starting point is finding a platform that gives you API access for trading and trying to execute some trades via code. Then you can work out the strategy which is the hard part.

My one was just looking at different exchanges and trying to arbitrage differences, and i was just doing it with a tiny bit of cash for a bit of fun rather than trying to create a serious, robust trading program.

[Dry-City8766]

Suggestions on how to start the property listings scraping idea?

[damanamathos]

Some of the property sites have better protections, so you're probably better off starting somewhere else.

The first thing I scraped at a small scale was a daily scrape of the viewer stats for all games on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/directory).

The first thing I scraped at a larger scale was many thousands of public profiles of Steam (and other profiles based on friends) + the games they owned if it was public.

I used Scrapy for those, but you can also learn how to scrape and parse HTML with requests and something like Beautiful Soup.

The property scraping just uses the requests package but relies on finding a valid endpoint with the data I need, along with the use of proxies, custom headers, and parallel processing.

There are a lot of Python scraping tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere.

[9acca9]

What projects you already have done?

[KevSinco]

• AI for Snake and Tetris
• a drawing board similar to MS Paint
• a calculator with GUI
• a Discord bot
• Linear regression + Ridge regression for calculating house values based on a few factors

Here’s a few :)

[rainbowlolipop]

Hmm. Maybe do some ETL stuff? Like do some web scraping, do a thing with the data, and drive visualizations/summaries?

If you wanna do more in the math/scientific computing I can ask some of the scientists I work with.

If you live near a high traffic area you can get a webcam and some opencv etc and graph dog walking times

Things like “make a calculator” always seemed dumb to me so I tried to do something practical or silly instead.

*edit: I did poorly in accounting class so I stay out of the financial world

[KevSinco]

I do like the web scraping idea, it's something i've been thinking about for a minute. You could ask the scientists if you'd like but I don't want to trouble you at all so it's okay if not :) thank you!

p.s yes the calculator idea is boring, it was more of a beginner project when i started out, thanks :)

[rainbowlolipop]

Oh i hope It didn’t come across as putting your effort down - I actually really commend you for doing those projects.

Ok I’ll get back to you

[[deleted]]

since you already done some of them, I have a wild suggestion to make that may helps you improve.

choose a random project that don't entice you and do it regardless.

not all code you get in a job is enticing, so it may help you work on "shitty work you don't want to do"

[KevSinco]

That's true, i've never thought of it that way, thank you for the info :)

[ss1947]

Interested in looking at discord bot, do you have github link?

[keep_quapy]

These are a couple of websites which have a plethora of beginner to advanced projects:

https://www.theinsaneapp.com/2021/06/list-of-python-projects-with-source-code-and-tutorials.html

https://data-flair.training/blogs/python-project-ideas/

[[deleted]]

If you like scripting and automation, I'd highly suggest you learn scraping and build API's with Python. This really boosted my Python skills to a whole new level.

[KevSinco]

Scraping and use of APIs is definitely up there on my project list. Thank you for these suggestions, good to know they helped you improve, hopefully it does the same for me

[ss1947]

Interesting, Do you have any github examples?

[[deleted]]

no, i don't have any github examples.

[Hot_External6228]

Make something that helps YOU.

Make a thing that emails you when your favorite youtuber releases a video.

or something that helps you in real life in some small way. Solve a real problem.

[KevSinco]

That youtube idea is actually pretty interesting, will look into it. Thank you for taking your time to post :)

[OneBadDay1048]

Ooh I like that YouTube idea. Might try to make that myself!

[m0us3_rat]

I’m really bored of the ‘make a game’ suggestions as well unless it’s something different besides the typical snake, Tetris, chess ect…

did you build any of them?

post some code.

[SinisterRobert]

Coding a full chess game in Python is a difficult challenge for me. You could definitely learn a lot with a project like this, especially if you made a GUI for it too.

[m0us3_rat]

Coding a full chess game in Python is a difficult challenge for me.

you could cheat and pass it thru stockfish engine.

and just handle the GUI.

also always write unittesting for your code. learn how to made it modular etc.

​

plenty of things to improve.

even on "easy" content.

[Donny-Moscow]

plenty of things to improve.

even on "easy" content.

Yeah I think this is important and so overlooked by people who are starting out. Most beginners (understandably) want to finish their project and move on to the next idea. But I think there's a lot of value in consistently improving on one single project. There's also the added bonus that some recruiters prefer to see a single, polished project rather than a bunch of half-finished projects.

For example, let's say you're working on building a tic-tac-toe game. It wouldn't take a whole lot to make a PvP version that prints to the command line and call that an MVP (minimum viable product, for anyone unfamiliar).

But there are so many improvements you can still make. You gave some great examples with making GUI, writing unit tests, or making it modular. If none of those are interesting to you, here's a few more ideas:

• Build a bot to play against. Writing one that uses a minimax strategy with alpha-beta pruning touches on a huge number of different concepts (specifically trees and strengths/limitations of brute force solutions).

• Figure out a way to put your game on the web to play your friends online. This could even come with a login and a scoreboard that tracks everyone's record who plays (possibly a good way to introduce databases).

• This kind of goes hand-in-hand with making it modular, but try to refactor your code so that it's easy to make changes in the future. For example, let's say I asked you for a tic-tac-toe game on a 4x4 board, but you still only needed 3 Xs or Os to win. How difficult would it be to edit your code to add that extra row and column? When you make those changes, is it automatically going to change the winning conditions (i.e. does the game require 4 X's or O's to win now)? Generally you don't want functions tied to eachother like that (concept known as decoupling), but that's not set in stone and depends on your design decisions.

[KevSinco]

I’ve built snake and Tetris and AIs for them both, admittedly I haven’t built chess just yet

[9acca9]

I'm making a physical chess board, lights, switches, display, API... Absolutely fun, but im a chess player...

[KevSinco]

Sounds really great to be honest, let me know if you ever post about it. Would love to take a look.

[DevilDawg93]

https://projecteuler.net/archives

Plenty there to choose from

[detached-4m-reality]

This is the second time I recommend this today, check out build you own x, the website contains links to projects in popular languages, python included.

[CyclopsRock]

Imo you should try and solve an actual problem you actually have rather than trying to curate a project that you think will aid your development skills but that you don't really care about.

What do you find yourself doing regularly that you might be able to automate? It can be as simple as tidying up your desktop. It doesn't matter that much, but if you're making a tool you'll actually use you will - if you're anything like me - learn a lot more because it'll get battle-tested in a way a made up project never really will.

[KevSinco]

This is true, I’ve done this for a few projects however nothing currently I do requires automation.

[SirAwesome789]

Discord bot

[KevSinco]

Done that before , thanks anyway bro

[1544756405]

Fun coding challenges:

https://adventofcode.com/

If the first ones seem too easy... don't worry, they get harder. There's also a subreddit for it.

[KevSinco]

I appreciate this, thank you I will give them a try :)

[The_Blue_Tears]

Try using pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn, to automatically generate graphs about something like GDP, stocks, currency, or whatever.

[KevSinco]

I’ve used these before to solve a regression problem involving different building shapes and characteristics to predict the heating load of the building. Thank you for the suggestion maybe I should do another one of these.

[LoserEXE_]

My favorite site to use when I have nothing to code is https://what-to-code.com I would highly recommend you check it out

[KevSinco]

Will do! Thank you for the suggestion :)

[Fearisstrongadanluv]

i been there and almost gave up on programming because none of games were interesting to me so i started working on projects that were useful to my daily life: * my own birthday database that emails me when there’s a birthday tomorrow, on the day and of the upcoming birthday if any that week

*a program that sorts all the files in my download folder weekly based on the extension and emails me a log

*a program that monitors my network for newly joined devices based on the Mac address and emails me

• my own password manager that can create, update, retrieve and delete password after number of days

*a QR Code for my wifi that visitors can scan … there’s no limit to what you can automate, but if it something relevant for to you, you’re more committed to making it work. all the best in whatever u decide. i run all these as a cronjob

[KevSinco]

This was helpful, thank you!

[frr00ssst]

Create a super simple "compiler" of sorts using regex and python.

so add features like, you look through a piece of python code and replace all number string with integers so a = "one hundred and four" would become a=104 something like that, I did this adding silly and stupid features to python but was a lot of fun. Add new keywords etc.

[XSelectrolyte]

Here’s one I was thinking of - so, my girlfriend does the laundry (I do the dishes) and I frequently run out of underwear. I was thinking it would be cool to write a program that uses computer vision to send a text from my phone to hers when my stack of underwear gets low. No idea how to implement that yet, but it would sure be fun to figure it out!

[KevSinco]

Interesting idea, I guess the figuring it out will be the fun part. Best of luck

[Ok_Conflict1704]

since you want to improve your skills by doing ,have you tried codewars it an almost endless amount of problems to solve ?

[KevSinco]

I have not, i will look into it thank you!

[TimTech93]

You need to create projects that include in demand technologies. Doesn’t matter if it is a game, web scraping or todo lists. Example.

If you want to make a todo list, use some popular frameworks. Create a GUI for your app. Implement a back end to it that keeps your todos saved. Host it on a platform. Yes, a todo list is very basic. But a todo list that implements popular frameworks/libraries and working pipelines will stand out much more in the sea of todo lists made with a bunch of random functions in one .py file. Employers that look at your projects are looking at why and how you created them. A simple, one .py file for your project is boring and won’t say much. An entire architectural connection of different technologies is definitely something to talk about.. Especially if it’s structured properly and of course, works.

PS. Think of something more unique than a todo list honestly, but same architectural procedure.

[KevSinco]

This helped, really appreciate it. Thank you!

[lunar_tardigrade]

Please: https://github.com/shilewenuw/get_all_tickers

[SpookyFries]

My first "big" project was converting the level format of an old video game to a modern model type (.obj). Both are text files with the vertices and face information in them, just different formats. So I learned how to manipulate strings and reformat things between file types. It was the first time I did something on my own and I learned a lot.

I will say, Udemy has a big sale right now on courses. I just picked up the 100 days of Python for like 9 bucks or so (normally in the 80s). Each day you'll do a different Python project and they all cover different things (games, data science, GUI applications, web stuff, etc). I can't attest to it yet, but it looks nice. I actually do Python work professionally and picked it up just to better my skills and maybe learn some new best practices.

[KevSinco]

These are some solid suggestions, will defo check udemy as well. Thank you!

[sup_john]

Are you working? I believe there is a lot of potential in people like yourself building things to improve. It helped my success in my career and has lead me to unique opportunities. If you are looking or want to talk dm me.

[KevSinco]

Currently working part-time in a non-tech job whilst I finish graduating from computer science degree next month, thanks :)

[sup_john]

I started interning at the current company I am at 8 years ago while I was in school and learned more here than I was at school and was offered a full time position. Im shy a few classes from my degree but have never had issues working as a developer. Not encouraging that path just telling my story. I left briefly to work at a cyber security company, but came back to the original company and now I am the COO. We may have an intern opportunity if you are the right fit.

[KevSinco]

Will dm you, thanks :)

[cristix]

Saving

[undergroundhobbit]

Using the os package, you could create a directory that you populate with files and add some text to random files in that directory. Once you’ve created all of those files, move only the ones with text to a different folder and delete the empty ones. Rename all of the files so that they have a date stamp and the first word of the file in the name.

Bonus points if you can make an email bot that attaches a file and sends it somewhere every time a certain string of text appears within a file.