These Coding Projects Will Set You Apart as a Programmer (w/ Instructions Included)

you completed a programming tutorial but still don't know how to code so you take another tutorial and another and another nothing seems to be getting better and you can't figure out why you're putting in all of this time and effort coding these projects but feel no more competent than you did after the first tutorial well congratulations you're in what's known as tutorial help but I'm here to extend you a ladder so that you can climb your way out of this hell hole and become the programmer you've always dreamt of or not it's up to you now just imagine me reading the whole thing like this let me actually close that door over there hey guys welcome to the video I'm A programmer who's built countless projects over the years as a hobbyist as a WABE iOS Developer as a computer science student as a YouTuber as a portfolio Builder and as a professional software engineer and currently building a platform for developers from the ground up now many of those projects haven't seen the light of day but I have found value in every single project I've built more value in these projects than any tutorial or online course I've ever taken so today I've Consolidated a handful of projects I've personally built to share with you complete with instructions on how to do it and the lessons I've learned that way you can build them and hopefully learn just as much as I did and at the end of the video I am going to include a couple of honorable mention projects that I feel like should be added to the list but I didn't as well as a project that I haven't built just yet but that I plan to soon or at least would like to in 2024 the very first project I'm going to talk about has the ability to be difficult for any level of developer whether you're a novice or proficient programmer that is building mini gamess I built many of these back when I was a computer science student around 2017 as well as just as recently is last month I built my first however during my very first programming class ever in Java I remember it like it was yesterday a fully functional game of tic-tac-toe in the terminal using dashes and plus signs and pipes to draw the grid and of course X's and O's for the X's and O's prompting each user to Mark a square on the grid when it's their turn I learned a lot during this process inputs and outputs printing variables functions NFL statements and just by building a game we all already know and love I found that comforting because I didn't have to try to learn about the thing that I was building I got to focus solely on the logic and printing out things in the terminal it really simplified the process for me and gave me a one toone understanding of how code Works to build this yourself you can really use whatever programming language you want just whip up net beans or code blocks which are idees or integrated development environments which I specifically mention because that means they have built-in build and run tools that way you can focus solely on the logic of what you're building instead of trying to figure out how to build it and how to run it you do that start looking up a little bit here and there and start coding that's the way to get it done don't copy and paste whole entire code blocks just start coding little by little if we want to take this minigame project to the next level we can do that too one route is web development I recently built a miname website containing five different games Word Search decryption challenge code trivia card match and riddle reveal this not only reinforces everything I learned from building the tic tac toe game came back 8 n years ago but also adds in that element of front-end development I used react use cases um even more logic than before and to add even more to this getting the website live using GitHub actions and hosting her who by the way is the sponsor of this video but we'll get to them a little bit later just know in the meantime they have an outstanding Black Friday web hosting deal of 85% off it's the best deal I've ever seen them have so if you build any websites at all now is probably the best time to buy hosting especially especially if you use my link in the description and then my code Forest at checkout for an extra 10% off but again more on them later take a look at this it's a onetoone difference in my implementation of Caesar Cipher decryption Challenge on the left you'll see the terminal application that I built with Java and on the right you'll see the web version built with JavaScript and react and CSS and HTML of course same project different languages different desired outcomes to build the website version of mini games all you have to do is whip up something like a vit project using mpm Create V app just do that in VSS code start the server and start coding you're able to build out the logic in front end design from there because you have a working application or we'll call it a website already and you can see every little change that you make now slightly moving on from minigame project while still keeping it in mind because a minigame project or just any sort of video game from back in the day like Tetris or something can also be an Avenue to learn artificial intelligence and I mean the Deep stuff algorithms not the hype in school I built Connect 4 and then I implemented an alphabeing pruning algorithm which is an optimization technique for the minia max algorithm I also built a sodoku solver utilizing a naive backtracking algorithm that simply searches for empty cells and tries a number checking each time if the number will lead to a solution and if not backtracks and tries the next number but that wasn't good enough so I also implemented a smart backtracking algorithm with minimum remaining values or mrv a more optimized backtracking algorithm using the mrv puristic which involves selecting the cell with the fewest legal values to try next reducing the number of branches in the search tree making this algorithm more efficient and I built a soab bond solver with a Litany of algorithms to use like BFS DFS a couple Renditions of AAR with different humanistics a couple of greedy best first searches and uniform cost search this was my first forray into artificial intelligence back in 2017 17 so needless to say I learned a whole lot more than I can simply put into words and keep the scope of this video here now for you to build something like this take the game you already built like sodoku and start with a simple AI technique like a naive backtracking algorithm figure out how to write that and tie it in with your code which is all very simple get it working and then experiment with other algorithms or enhance the existing algorithm to include mrv heris or what have you that's it and by the way I'm giving you loose instructions for a reason because this is similar to what I was given when I built these projects and in doing so I had to figure all of this out myself there's only so much you can learn from following a tutorial online word for word cod line for COD line you can see kind of the overall idea of how a project is built but you don't really learn code or the logic so when you have to figure out these things yourself utilizing the loose instructions that's where you're really going to learn the next project can take shape in many ways it can be GitHub repositories enhanced with a GitHub read me or a custom website laying out what we've built how we built it and why or even a full-fledged interactive website that thoroughly showcases your skills not just on the website but with the website that's right the most boring project on the list but probably the most important if you're looking for a job or just want to showcase your skills portfolio what just about everyone starts out with is a GitHub profile what you see is what you get code and a repo but you can also enhance each individual repo with a readme file to explain what you built and how you built it meaning what languages Technologies and or algorithms did you use and then it would be helpful if you listed out how to use it like I did here with a list of commands or if it's a website linking to the website in the repost description for easy access but to enhance that even more you can also create a profile readme file in GitHub that enhances your homepage to really make that GitHub profile complete and if you've been looking at the screen for the past 10 seconds instead of just having me open in an extra Tab while you work on something else maybe you're coding a project or something you would have seen that I build all these things myself you know why though because a lead developer once came and spoke to my program in class back in school and a student asked probably a question we were all thinking how much does a GitHub profile matter when applying to jobs the speaker's response simply it matters but what if I'm not really that proud of my projects the student asked and the speaker said something is better than nothing A GitHub profile with simple projects is better than no GitHub profile at all I'll personally never forget those words even though I'm not actively looking for a job because at that time I wasn't really proud of my projects either they were just silly little basic projects that I knew had no bearing on what you actually built in the field but after after he said that the tech lead who by the way hires more Developers for his Dev team so in other words he knows what he's talking about I uploaded all of those silly little simple projects to my GitHub and have tried my best to maintain my GitHub profile ever since he did specify however that it's not just specific to GitHub of course it's just we want to see what you can do in whatever way you choose to Showcase your work like a website there are two ways to approach a portfolio website though if you're a webdev don't just use the website to Showcase your skills on it but build something that showcases your skills with it a website that if I'm looking for a frontend developer and I click on your website I don't even need to take a look at any of your other projects because I'm just in awe over the amazing portfolio website that you've built I always wanted a website like this myself and maybe one day I will but as a programmer you you kind of realize that guess what not everyone's a web def I mean for example take a look at some of these websites these are some of the most prominent figures in computer science and not exactly breathtaking these websites look like something straight out of the 90s before CSS was invented but their websites aren't indicative of their skills nor should they be these individuals work on computer science theory and algorithms and in that space not web design or web development so no a portfolio website doesn't need to be this beautiful thing that's not a necessity all it has to do is show case your work in your field that's what I did when I built my minimal developer portfolio last year wait crap I kind of forgot I built this thing how do I use this thing help this is my fun little portfolio project that yep still curating most projects are offline on get hope or confidential That was supposed to be a portfolio but I never added the projects so yeah kind of forgot about that one that's not what I meant to pull up this is what I meant to pull up just a little minimal developer portfolio with light and dark mode showcasing a couple projects here linking to them like as you can see here with what I built and how I built it as in languages and Technologies as you can see here a bit more information about myself and well now that I look at it I'm not actually that happy with it not that it's a bad website but as you can see from this video I have a whole hell of a lot more projects than just these three I don't think these three that I have listed on the website are indicative of my skills oh yeah that's right I built this partly for the tutorial last year with new devs in mind who may only have two or three projects to their name that's what I did well yeah if you want to build a minimal developer portfolio I've made two videos on this a showcase as well as as a tutorial video so uh I guess check those out those are the instructions right there for you yeah um I'll link those two videos in the description and if you build a website like that you'll need to host the website that's where hostinger comes in and honestly it's just really good hosting for a really good price and I'm not just saying that I've been using them for years with no issues and right now they have their best Black Friday deal of all time up to 85% off hosting plus their website builder which we'll talk about in a second a free domain free website migration 24/7 customer support and 2 months free plus remember and extra 10% off when you use my code forest and the link in the description which by the way is hosting your /ar night and it's really easy to get started just click on the link of the description hostinger.com sfar night claim deal choose your plan we'll choose premium here pick the amount of time you want which for me is forever so I'll go with 48 months plus 2 months free and then come down here and make sure you add in my coupon code f o r s apply and as you can see an extra 10% off they're already pretty dang good Black Friday deal from there everything is very straightforward thanks to the hosting r h panel just make sure you change your DNS record record and you're good to go or we can take a look at another way in building a developer portfolio to Showcase your skills using hostinger AI website builder and this is how you do it under the hosting tab in your H panel set up your premium web hosting or whichever you got click Start now we want to create a new website and then we can go with WordPress psych we're going to go with hostinger Builder with AI and then of course we have to claim our free domain what do we want that to be definitely a.com right but let's go with devotes newsletter. because I need this domain anyway so I might as well get it now all right and then you fill out your personal information you're not going to see mine all right here it is let AI create you a website in minutes start creating I'm so curious what this is going to look like brand name website type description okay I know I picked the devotes URL but this is for me so this is for the portfolio so we're going to say brand name is farest night I am a brand and then we're going to create a portfolio this is my personal software development portfolio that showcases projects I've built complete with an image of it what technologies I use to build them listed out and a description of what it does to build it listed Out Create website all right I'll see you in a second so here is where it sits so home takes you down to portfolio oh no that takes you over to a portfolio page interesting so home we have my name a picture of me presumably about me another picture just to break up the monotony and then we have featured projects recent projects so you can just kind of have like a little Montage of projects here project project project project and then they contact me which is something I also included in my portfolio website come over to portfolio page has that description right here a few more images of your projects and then boom weather app e-commerce website task management you can keep adding sections I like this obviously we would need to fill out our own information within here oh it also has this which I included in my minimal uh website as well what did I name that I have my timeline here and it also has a timeline education work experience freelance projects and you can list whatever you want out within that if you need I'm a software developer with a passion for creating Innovative and userfriendly applications with expertise in various Technologies such as Java Python and JavaScript I have built a diverse range projects that showcase my skills and experience this is actually pretty cool I like that and over here we can add element adjust pages and navigation website Styles start writing a Blog so you can add a CMS aspect into this and then you can also integrate an online store wow I actually didn't know I could do that that's pretty insane huh logo maker AI Rider AI heat map analytics SEO form submission information Integrations what is this Google Analytics WhatsApp Google AdSense dude what this is sick and then languages of course nice I'm not going to lie that's actually really cool I wasn't I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about it I was just going to Showcase it but I will be honest with you I do I like it it's a good starting point for you to be able to build out from there put in your information definitely worth checking out it's included in your hosting or web hosting package whatever you choose premium business whatever the heck the third one is check it out hostinger.com forestnight Link in description use code Forest at checkout for an extra 10% off these next projects are effectively one of the same but both equally as fun my AI robots last year I built an AI Nerf gun that shoots me in the face when I get distracted and this year in 2023 I built an AI coffee gun that feeds me coffee at regular intervals to maximize efficiency both projects utilize artificial intelligence and robots which is a term I'm using in set of internet of things because I don't know Internet of Things is just a really weird term to me you two or just me all right sick I learned about Electronics arduinos tensor flow object detection segmentation real-time face tracking proper GPU utilization Jupiter notebook and so much more and despite the late nights of frustrating errors and just things that shouldn't have been happening in the first place I don't think I've ever had as much fun coding as I did when building these projects so if you're looking for a fun project or you're trying to reignite that spark that you once had for coding this may be the project for you all you need to do is simple just do research buy the stuff install a crap ton of packages and libraries write some code or steal some code you do whatever you want tie the code together you're going to have to work with some Electronics do this do that just that's how you get started and all of this kind of like the overall showcase and how these project projects were built there's two videos about them uh maybe I'll just have a fullon link just a bunch of links about all these projects in the description and you'll be able to see a little bit more of how these projects are done remember they're not tutorials they're showcases and the overall just fun little video with a fun little project but they are helpful to give you an overall idea of how they're built now it's time for the honorable mentions and that one project that I'd like to build but I haven't yet my favorite project of all time the one that broke down that coding barrier for me tournament simulation now this is an honorable mention instead of a main project because I've already made an entire video about it and I don't really want to just rehash all that information that video is probably just as long as this entire video where I go into full detail on the project walk you through everything tell you why I love that project and how it really broke down that coding barrier for me so that's why it's an honorable mention go check out that video for full detail that project is definitely worth building the second honorable mention is a chess AI bot I actually started building one of these back in September or so August to participate in Sebastian log's AI chess tournament thing that you may have seen on YouTube but if you didn't we also mentioned it in the devotes newsletter where he set out specific criteria and a starting point consisting of everything you need whereas all you need to do is implement the AI however the deadline for all of this was a the beginning of October and I kind of had a baby at the beginning of September so I was a little bit preoccupied in the project I'd like to build but haven't yet although I may figure out a way to somehow integrate it into the devotes platform is anything utilizing open AI or chat GPT this could be in the form of a chat GPT Plugin or creating something for open ai's GPT store or it could be something so simple which is what I would do with DeVos platform if I do which I probably will is utilize the open aai API wait I've definitely used the open AI API I that's right I utilized the gpt3 API when I built data set GPT in that video for bright data I don't understand how I forget these things anyway just build some a fun project would be to build something that you can put on the GPT store maybe even potentially make a little bit of money or create a chat GPT plugin preferably the former I just think that would be a pretty cool project to build for now well it looks like it's about time to get back to coding on the devotes platform which by the way we're going to be launching the MVP soon and going to be needing some beta testers here in the next few weeks I'm just saying you should probably get to coding to if you can't decide what project to build just write them all down on a post-er note each stick them on the wall and throw a dart at it it doesn't matter what you build as long as you build something or feel free to check out those project videos I mentioned in this video or do none of that and just tell me to f off I don't care I do hope you have a good day though I'll see you in the next one

Channel: ForrestKnight

Views: 546,906

Keywords: coding projects, beginner coding projects, programming, computer science, how to learn coding, learn to code, how to learn progrmaming, software development, software engineering, how to code, advanced coding projects

Id: 8XVI_Zrvz3c

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023