Top-notch Coding Projects for Employment!

foreign so if you're watching this video then chances are that you're a programmer and you're looking for a job or at least looking to work on some kind of projects that could Pat your resume so in this video I'm going to share with you a ton of different project ideas so that you have no excuse and you can go and start working on a project right after this video so first I want to share with you kind of a recipe or a checklist for programming projects so that you know you're working on something that's good and that has a higher chance of actually being seen viewed and hopefully help you get a job so when you're working on a programming project the first thing you need to do is make sure that this is going to be easy to run and easy to use what I mean by that is it can't have 20 installation steps it can't take five minutes to get up and running it ideally should be a website it should be a one-click install it can maybe be like two or three terminal commands if it's a technical audience who's going to be looking at it but ideally you want it to be as easy to run and use as possible next you want to be kind of creative you want to do something ideally That's Unique if you're just following it's a tutorial if you're just building something that a hundred other people have built and that have put in the resume pile it's not going to stand out and even though it might be complicated and kind of impressive that you built it's still not as good as something that's more personal and kind of custom and ideally solve some kind of problem for you or someone else so that's the next step here if you can make it custom if you can make this apply to your everyday life it's going to be much easier for you to talk about in an interview setting and something that again is just kind of more creative it's more interesting to listen to than the 100th person explaining that they built a you know algorithm visualizer right which is a really popular programming project now next I'd say that whatever project you work on should imply that you have a deep knowledge of programming and that you're a good program right whatever you work on should seem complicated even if it's not the most complicated thing in the world it should seem like oh that must have been kind of hard to build or he must have had to do this this and this that's what you want people to get the sense of when they're looking at even like the name of the project because that's what's going to make it impressive now lastly any great project should have a great GitHub so you should have a really good readme it should be very presentable even just nice commit messages if someone is actually going to go and look at the source code it obviously should be nice and clean it should be well written it should have comments explaining it I wouldn't normally say like comment the crap out of your code but if you're going to have like a recruiter or an interviewer or something reading through it then you might want to spend a bit more time like prettifying the code and making it really easy to navigate and understand alright so that's kind of my recipe or checklist for programming projects now we'll get into a bunch of different ideas and categories of projects however if you are looking to host your programming project then you should check out the sponsor of this video before we get started I need to thank lenode for sponsoring this video I've been using and working with lenode for nearly three years now and they've consistently been my go-to choice for hosting my applications and servers in fact right now I'm using the node to host the official Tech with Tim Discord bot a website multiple of my domains and a kubernetes cluster now lenode was just recently acquired by Akamai and as a part of this acquisition they're going to be adding more than a dozen new data centers around the world in the next year lenode makes it super easy to spin up servers with their one-click app Marketplace and have tons of written guides and YouTube videos on their channel to help you get started now if you're having any issues you can reach out to the 24 7 support team and actually talk with a real human being now the node's pricing is simple with no hidden fees and full transparency and you can test out the node services for free by using the link in the description and claiming in a 100.60 day credit for any new accounts it's been an absolute pleasure to work with lenode over the past few years and one last thank you to them for sponsoring this video alright so diving in here to the first category of programming projects we have web applications or websites now these will probably be the most popular and most common type of programming projects just because they are the easiest to deploy to use and to kind of explain and send over to different people they don't actually need to look at any code that only needs to any setup steps they can just go directly to a website and have access to your project now first what I want to do is give you a few examples of different Tech Stacks I might use when I'm building a web application then I'll give you a bunch of different ideas for web apps you could build that are pretty impressive and more unique than your like traditional web applications so the first stack I might recommend using is the mernstack now this is mongodb Express react and node now mongodb is a different type of database it's a nosql database some companies do look for nosql database uses and kind of experience with that so depending on the kind of role that you're applying for you might go towards a stack like that you may also check something out like the mean stack now this is mongodb Express angular and then node you might also do the mevin or mevn stack which is just view instead of angular or react so pick whatever stack you want there but I think mongodb is a good one to use just because it's very simple and you don't have to deal with the whole database setup I'll unless that's something that you maybe want to show off continuing we also have a stack that involves postgres so if you want to use an actual SQL database a lot of companies might be looking for that if you're just applying as like a front-end developer you probably don't need to mess with all that but if you are applying it's more of a full stack or a back-end developer I'd probably recommend going with a SQL database and doing some kind of back end where maybe you have a goaling back end connected to a postgres database and then you have some kind of react front end or whatever front end you want to build lastly you could do a serverless stack whatever kind of serverless functions you want to write is fine I usually use something like Firebase just because that's the simplest especially when it comes to deployment again whatever you want to do here I'm just giving you a few stack examples you can kind of choose which one you'd want to use depending on the kind of role that you're applying for all right so now in terms of a bunch of different ideas for web applications obviously you can just punch in chat GPT give me ideas for web apps but I think some popular ones to do are like social media clones right now this is something that is done by a lot of people but it's pretty complicated not many people can actually make like a decent functioning social media clone so if you can do that that's going to show pretty deep knowledge and I'd say that's a worthy project to have on a resume like a Twitter clone an Instagram clone maybe even something like Snapchat I don't think many people do that maybe you could pick like a more Niche social media and that'd be a more unique project and just to clarify here you don't have to literally build Instagram or Twitter you build a small subset of those features to show that you understand how to interact with databases how to serve maybe live data maybe you're notifying users this would be a big project but again a good one for a resume continuing you might try to do something that is just a component of a social media app like a live feed Believe It or Not implementing a feed can actually be pretty complicated when you're talking about dynamically loading data having like a recommendation engine for showing different pieces of data Maybe showing advertisements so that could be a cool I wouldn't call it a mini project but a different style of project where you just have a live kind of running feed of data and you have different interactions with that data recommendation engine that would be like a cool project to talk about from a more back-end perspective continuing you could maybe make something like a sport bracket generator or like a March Madness bracket uh like website so recently I did like a March mad Madness bracket With My Friends the website was actually fairly straightforward and it just allowed you to input all the teams you thought were gonna win and like match them all up against each other and then as the games were played it would live update on the website and tell you if the team won lost and how many points you got so that's a pretty decent project you could work on you could hook it up to some kind of sports API that gave you like the live data I think that'd be a cool and pretty unique project continuing you could do something like typing racer so I'm sure many of you have seen that website where you're live typing against someone else I actually attempted to build this on a live stream in 12 hours I didn't quite complete the project but the reason I wanted to do this is because it involves using sockets which is live communication that's pretty much real time so you have like a real-time web app which feels a lot different than an app where you have to like refresh the screen you're not getting live data Etc so those are a few ideas there feel free to Branch off of them come up with anything that you want but hopefully that gave you a bit of inspiration for creating a web app alright so my next category here is mobile apps now this could be like a mobile web app so something that just runs in like Safari or runs on a browser in your phone but I'm more thinking of native mobile apps like a Android app or an IOS app or an iPad app or a Mac app or something like that I think that these are pretty cool to build they're pretty unique and a lot of people are building mobile apps at least I'm pretty sure for their resume projects obviously if you're applying as some kind of mobile developer then you're going to want to have this but even if you're applying for a regular Dev job I think it's cool to have a mobile app in your portfolio the reason I like these projects too is because if you can actually get this on say the Google Play Store if you could get it even on test flight if you're talking about the app store or iOS then it's really easy for someone to download and test out and this also shows someone that you've gone through the whole process of packaging an app signing an app bundling it deploying it getting everything into a production ready State and actually you know putting this out into the marketplace which is something that a lot of people don't do so I think it's an interesting talking point in an interview and especially if you can build a mobile app that's useful that's solving some kind of problem it doesn't have to be super complicated as long as it's kind of well polished for it to stand out and be an impressive project to discuss and to look at on a resume so in terms of some ideas here I have kind of General categories like you could do a health app like a calorie tracker a water intake tracker maybe you're going to do something where you're logging all of your workouts I know there's all kinds of apps that exist like that but it's kind of an interesting and simple enough idea to build you could do a recipe app where you're maybe adding different recipes tracking recipes changing them whatever you could do something even simple like a game like you could do a version of Cookie Clickers even the fact that it's just a mobile app that someone can download I don't think the actual app idea itself needs to be crazy as long as it kind of shows that you've gone through this whole process of getting an app into the marketplace which is not trivial to do continuing I had a unique idea this was actually an app that I built back when I was like 16. and this was a textbook page organizer now I know that means nothing to you but essentially when I was like 16 in high school I used to walk uh to school and I had these like really heavy textbooks and I hated carrying my textbooks every day back and forth to school on like a 20 minute walk so what I would do is take photos of the pages that I needed so when I went home I could just load it on my computer and view it where I could load it on my phone and view it and I didn't have to um what do you called bring the bring the textbook with me now what happened was eventually I had so many freaking photos on my phone of all the different textbook pages that I could never find the one that I was looking for so I made a very simple IOS app where what I could do is go in the app upload the photo and then I could like tag it with the page number a little bit of information I could like put put it in a category and now I had an app on my phone that had all the textbook photo pages and I could delete the actual pages from my camera roll to keep the camera roll nice and clean so very simple app idea but it was actually useful and I think I put that on some of my earlier resumes it was a great talking point during the interview so hopefully that gave you a few ideas now the next category alright so next I'm throwing out another project category I don't usually mention but this is internet of things now I like this because again this is kind of unique it's useful it's going to be tied into your life in some way and these automation projects or projects where you're interacting with real world components or sensors are actually really fun and interesting and I like working on them even just as a hobby project so in terms of Internet of Things projects really what this refers to is like interacting with like real world technology or sensors so like interacting with your fridge your microwave or some kind of like motor or camera something that's more than just software right you actually have some Hardware component that you're controlling based on some script API whatever it may be now a few examples here could be something like preheating your coffee maker in the morning so I had a video actually I did on this where I had a little sensor I like uh connected it to my coffee heater and I had it so every time when I woke up at like eight in the morning or something some Loop or some timer went off and it like ran a script that like pressed the button on my coffee maker that started preheating it so when I went downstairs to get a coffee it was already preheated and I didn't have to wait I know first world problems but that's like an interesting idea and something that's relatively simple to build this still kind of looks cool on a resume continuing you could do something like a package detector so maybe you have a little AI script or like a computer vision script you build into a Raspberry Pi you connect the Raspberry Pi to a camera it's kind of at your front door or something and it you know tells you or it gives you a notification on your phone when a package is detected there so you can go and pick it up so the next idea I had here was a Raspberry Pi security system I've talked about this on some other videos because I did try to build this Pro project a while ago but essentially you have a Raspberry Pi you connect a camera to it you have some kind of like motor that controls a lock and then I had the camera sitting at like a door and it was running a facial detection script and if it detected the person's face it would automatically unlock the door if it didn't then it would like run a siren or something that was at least the initial idea I didn't end up finishing that project but a really cool one and again looks really unique and interesting on a resume and you can also talk about it kind of make jokes about it laugh about it Etc which is always nice in an interview setting lastly I had an automatic cat feeder so I actually have automatic cat feeders I have two of them but one of them was not working very well and I was like you know I could probably make this better I could do it so I could just like press a button on my phone I never ended up implementing that idea but I think it would be cool to kind of build like a little Hardware Contraption and have like a very simple software app where you could like press a button you could control the portion you could set like timers for when it was going to go off and I think that would be a cool resume project alright so moving on to my last category here I have to build build libraries software tools or to do open source contributions now I'm leaving this last because I think you should have some other projects on your resume before you add something like this just because it's not visual at all and it's something that you kind of have to look into a bit more to really appreciate however if you're going for a more back-end developer role or something where it's not like super visual or you're not expected to like build front-end applications then this could be really useful so I don't think I need to explain what like a library or a software tool is but in terms of an idea of what you could do I actually built this when I was I don't know it was like 18. and I kept having this issue where I would give people my python games but they couldn't run them because they couldn't get PIP to work on their computer so I built like a little automatic pip installer Library super super simple where essentially you just like imported a package in your python script and it would automatically check if you had pip if you didn't it would download and install pip for you and then it would go and download all of the requirements and install them for the project automatically when you ran the script so that was something that I used to allow like all of my non-technical friends to be able to play my python games I just give them like a little python file I'd say okay download python run python whatever the file name is and then it would just do everything for them so that they didn't have to deal with this whole installation process so hopefully that gives you an idea in terms of like tools or libraries obviously there's a bunch of other stuff you could do there and then open source contributions if there's a cool project you want to work on contribute to it and then mention that on your resume you kind of need to explain it something where you're gonna have to talk about it and what you've done it's not as visual as the other projects but I think it's definitely worth having so with that said I'm gonna wrap up the video here I realized I talked very quickly throughout that video but I just wanted to go as fast as possible give you guys the direct information like I always try to do in these videos and hopefully inspire you and give you a bunch of different ideas so that right now you can go to your editor and start working on some coding projects if you want some more project ideas you can check out my course programmingexpert.io from the link in the description I hope you all enjoyed the video I look forward to seeing you in another one [Music]

Channel: Tech With Tim

Views: 184,741

Keywords: tech with tim, programming, programming projects, programming project ideas, learn programming, programming projects to get a job, how to get a programming job, coding projects, best programming projects, cool programming projects, advanced programming projects

Id: VqO8vjh3VFI

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023