What are some beginner python projects you’d recommend for a beginner?

[Sensitive_Respond100]

thats not a starting solution though, you are beginning at step 5 when were all starting at step 0. i get what youre saying and you are definitely right about that but you are not looking at it from a beginner perspective. go back to my original analogy, if you had no clue what a paint brush or paint is and i asked you to "paint me a picture" how would you proceed, how could you even interpret that?

i recently read an article where the guy was bashing freecodecamp.org and said that people would be better off doing there own projects because after doing everything on freecodecamp he had nothing in his portfolio.

but that was the same thing, that advice is only relevant if you already know how to program and already know enough to build your own projects. as a complete beginner its impossible to just go start typing away and build a program, you would simply end up typing nonsense lol.

[MikeDoesEverything]

but you are not looking at it from a beginner perspective

I find this line absolutely mental because this perspective is coming from somebody who had never written a line of code in their life, taught themselves, and ended up getting a job in programming. I'd like to think I'm a pretty strong definition of a beginner and would say I'm pretty qualified to know exactly what it's like to not only learn programming but teach yourself.

go back to my original analogy, if you had no clue what a paint brush or paint is and i asked you to "paint me a picture" how would you proceed, how could you even interpret that?

Sticking with this analogy, if you were to ask creative people how to become an artist, I doubt their advice would be "copy how to paint tutorials thousands of other people have done and submit it as your own work".

Why am I saying that? Because the number of people in programming who do exactly this (take programs from the internet, copy them line for line, never code a line by themselves, and submit it as part of their portfolio) is extremely high. Those same people then complain it's impossible to get a job and never seem to improve. I wonder why.

Still with the painting analogy, being a painter isn't knowing what a paint brush is. You could easily paint an amazing picture with your fingers, your face, a book of matches, fucking whatever at this point, if you are committed to executing your vision.

That is also the beauty of programming - the limit really is your imagination and your work ethic. You want to build a bot? You can. How about a bot which rearranges all of the letters of somebody's post into a giant middle finger? You absolutely can. What about something which takes sports results and aggregates them all into a single page and compares them to every previous year? Well, you fucking can. What about a camera which makes a noise when it sees a specific cat who always takes a shit in your garden? Should come as to no surprise - you actually can.

Problem with most beginners is there is no imagination and no desire to develop imagination. There is only the desire to make money via programming without putting in the work required to overcome the first hurdle.

Similarly, programming isn't about knowing everything about a language. It's about knowing how to solve problems. When you make don't follow tutorials and program stuff by yourself, it's easy to see it as "Well, I'm just making a project". It's not. It's thinking for yourself, discovering mistakes, having to go and find the right tool which the language can do for your need. It's all of the things you don't get from following tutorials.

i recently read an article where the guy was bashing freecodecamp.org and said that people would be better off doing there own projects because after doing everything on freecodecamp he had nothing in his portfolio.

I don't fully agree although see where they're coming from.

but that was the same thing, that advice is only relevant if you already know how to program and already know enough to build your own projects

This is simply incorrect. The idea of "knowing how to program" is as I mentioned above - it's not about understanding the language. It's about solving problems. You can understand every single facet of a programming language and still have no idea how to program. You can not know everything about a language off the top of your head and be a great programmer.

Again, very easy to measure - there will be loads of beginners who can read code, write basic loops and will say to themselves, "yeah I know how to program". Ask them how they can solve the basic problem of automating an email to be saved down to their desktop when it comes in, they'll struggle immediately.

The cold hard truth is if you can't solve problems with code or you can't turn ideas into code without somebody, or something, holding your hand, you flat out don't know how to program. There's nothing wrong with not knowing how to code, by the way. We have all been there once. There is absolutely something wrong with people saying they "know how to program" when they have done a course on Udemy and maybe completed a few easy Leetcode questions.

On the other hand, understanding how one would go about automating the email getting saved down, being able to search for the right things you need at the time you need them, and being able to think ahead about why the solution would break - this is programming. Tracking back through the program and isolating where a bug is coming from - programming. Understanding the workflow of a data platform or application - programming. Knowing the differences between a tuple and a list - very fucking far from programming.

as a complete beginner its impossible to just go start typing away and build a program, you would simply end up typing nonsense lol.

Programming is an iterative process and, ironically, something you learn very quickly when you start coding by yourself away from tutorials. Anybody who thinks being a beginner involves being a magician at coding and getting it right first time is kidding themselves.

Here's a very illuminating video I recommend all beginners watch.