3 Types of Projects That Will Make You a Programmer 

As a professional dev, I miss these days sometimes... Learning software development via building anything I wanted was such a blast after school.

This video earned my subscription! Great job breaking it down and giving direction and concrete examples on where to start, what a roadmap from "easy" to "highly complex" projects looks like, and benchmarks to check your progress! Keep up the good work!

Great categorization. I think we can add another level after capstone level, which is 'Solving Real Problems' Which means that if someone worked on a clone project, he/she can work on some customization for this project to deliver it as a real solution for some potential customers, even for free to get some good experience in CV. For instance, an e-commerce clone project can be customized for a local grocery in the neighborhood.

Thanks so much for breaking this down! It's taken me months just to get a straight answer to this question - much appreciated!!

Informative video, my personal opinion is that once you go past the simple projects it is better to develop fewer projects while going very in--depth than trying to create many different ones. By in-depth I don't mean a large scope and a billion features, but take your time to think about the architecture and perhaps educate yourself with design patterns and see if you can fit at least one in. Most importantly, DO take your time to go over best practices to do certain things, even if it's something you can already code blindly - go and check how it can be done in different way, look over common approaches and see which ones you want to adopt. Understanding design and best practices is super important especially if you are going to try and land a job in the future - and when you do talk about your experiences dont mention your To Do List, it doesn't have to be a capstone project as long as we have taken the time to learn design/best practices in an intermediate project so you can elaborate further. Good luck.

Thanks Andy. You're very inspirational to me. In my case, I've only built one single capstone project which take me a lot of time and effort, but it's all worth it. Now I'm working as a full time developer.

I got my fist job as software engineer just a month ago, without a degree, but I am working with it for over 10 years now. I had 2!!! projects wich gave me the job, so that is really the sweet spot if you ask me. But 1 tip if you really want to get a job, don't just build a "test project" but try to make something usefull. my first project was some small administration software for the company i worked for. I told the owner i wanted to create it for free to test my skills, and if it would be usefull he could use it. now its being used for 2 years and it's perfect for your portfolio. project 2 was a webshop for myself, just to test my skills, not for profit. after 1 month of developing i had a live webshop wich solds way more products then expected. these 2 projects gave me the first job as software developer. but please don't just make test projects, try to make them work as if they are going to be used. you won't regret it!

This was genuinely helpful. Defining the tiers like you did really makes sense. Now I know to look for projects that don't require libraries, focus on the syntax. Then once I'm comfortable with that, move on to using libraries to do bigger things. Of course, I want to learn Rust. And my understanding at this point is that almost anything beyond printing a line requires a library of some sort.

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge! I liked the idea to mesure the complexity of a project by its functionalitys. Thats an objective criteria everybody would agree with.

This is pretty encouraging. I'm a fresh (24yo) IT networking technician with just a little bit of dev background "for fun", but mostly overall IT basic stuff knowledge. I got into a new job 4 months ago. I'm doing very well and I'm now in charge of many tasks that aren't supposed to be technician level, like managing my company's active directory (users, GPO, DNS and whatnot). I kept asking for more and more responsabilities and projects because I thrive to learn more and I was put in charge to create an application to automate the search, creation and modification of AD Users in the AD, including creating custom proprieties on the user objects do that we can use it with PowerBI to do some data analysis. I just finished it today after 2 weeks of work, 3 versions of the program. ~650 lines written in Powershell with a user friendly UI, the ability to filter users in the AD by any propriety (name, OU, groups, IpPhone, Location etc...) and other cool features, IMO. All of that said because this project rly sparked my interest for programming again and here I am looking for projects on my free time. Now that I got my basics covered in Powershell (already know SQL, AutoIT, C and a tiny bit of php, css, html as well) I think I wanna get started with Python and JS and some of your projects definitely spark my interest and ticking tgose boxes.Thanks for this awesome video!

Been watching a lot of your videos from my homepage the past few weeks. Great content bro. Subscribed

Thanks Andy, i now realise what I’ve been doing wrong all this time, I will start these apps immediately (thank goodness you published this video).

Becoming a paid "programmer" seems so complicated. It seems like one has to know SO much to just get a job. This isn't the case in many other careers.

Thanks for the tips Andy! Very handy ones!!!

The best advice I received on how to select projects based on knowledge and experience. Thanks dude

Thanks for the break down and for the link to list many examples that helped a lot

yet another phenomenal, informative video! love seeing these pop up in my feed :)

Can we give a round of a applause for this good info?! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

I think the capstone projects really improve skills, I have done like a few and every time I am finishing I look at the code I have written in previous project and want to improve/refactor it - because I have learned something as a programmer (unfortunately my perfectionism and sometimes laziness stop me from finishing fully a project)

Made 1 capstone and 3 projects between Intermediate and Capstone. Thank you for this video Andy

This helped me out so much I've done 10 low level projects and I feel so much more confident gaining a strong foundation . I'm now moving on to intermittent projects.

Thanks Andy. Great advice. This helps me a lot. Im a beginner in web develepment and I am trying to land my first job.

This breakdown of projects helps. Thank you for this video .

Thanks for putting this video Andy, was very helpful.

it's such a nostalgia to remember how i felt when i first began programming . This channels been inspirational . it was all rinse and reapeat and once fundamentals were cleared i had to build common sense in the art of coding , i finally reached the stage of learning mid fundamentals , most projects after that was just googling and copy and paste others code that you do really have grain understanding . Oh yea! really loved the tetris portfolio, built one myself it was not easy honestly, took me months to understand the concepts , the bitter process actaully rewarded me with building more games such as minesweeper and snake game as they all implement same features, Sudoku solver is also something thats crossing my mind . Oh and yea , even after all this cant discredit the importance of how much useful it is to read other peoples code , you stop reading and you cant improve , i came this far as reading peoples code pays rich dividends .

Thank you for the this video. People just starting out usually lack direction. Horrible situation to get out of. This helps

This is exactly the video I needed; thanks!

Thanks Andy for the great video, I'm a Hardware engineer with a lot of PCB design experience, and decided to switch my career to software. I'm in week 2 the exploration phase. Keep up the good work!

Thank you so much! This video brings more clarity I really needed

Excellent breakdown of the different types of projects to make while learning Wed Dev.

Great video! This was the exact video i needed and was looking for, thank you so much!

You can also start with simple project, improvise that to intermediate and further make it cap stone level. You can combine multiple simple & intermediate projects to make it a composite cap stone project.

I really needed this man thank you so much I've been stuck for a year, idk what to do as a beginner. I don't know what projects to make.

Thanks for this too the point vid. Your the first person who has done this.it really helped me thank you soo much . I subscribed aswel .thanks bro

For my micro controller class, I did a breakout game. Not only the game, but also showing it on a display (those small nokia ones) and programming the controls in a matrix pad.

This was very helpful, thank you so much!

Great advice! Thanks!

This is really good and answered a lot of questions I had. Thank you.

As the main project for this semester in my CS degree we are building a Search Engine that searches through documents and ranks them by similarity to the query and by popularity. It's not super-advanced but it is pretty good and functional. I'm only half way done now and I've put in 15-20 hours weekly for a month and a half now. Do you think that's a decent resume project, even though it's part of the curriculum?

I needed it. Thanks for sharing.

very useful video and this is what I am looking for in the last while, keep on posting such great videos.

Me: "how to become a web-dev" RU-vidr: "just build Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon and you should be ready for junior position. "

Dude, seriously, top shelf presentation, thanks!! 👊😎

I actually have the reverse issue. I've been programming since my early teen years. at the time I did it for fun, and never really looked into loading libraries, I actually went through a face were I thought that using other peoples code was cheating or lame. I don't think that way now, but I do find myself struggling to use libraries like react, or other frameworks. I've been using laravel for a couple of weeks now and I really enjoy it, but it's definitely different from what I'm used to.

Currently, I´m building a Booking Appointment App for a Doctor's Clinic as my Capstone project. I´m really struggling because I´m working beyond my comfort zone. Based on the MERN stack, I plan to sell the project to a small Doctor's Clinic or a Beauty salon in my city. I plan to position myself in a popular place to be noticed as a self-taught Developer, with an ability beyond the average. I hope these every sleepless night brings its reward.

That's the best video on that subject. Thank you kindly.

I think one thing a lot developers miss when it comes to a career journey in coding is to try and look for opportunities in Professional Services first. The bar is very step in Product Development teams and get your nose wet in professional services is a great way to get experience and work your way up.

thanks you man your advices is in the right time

This video will be very useful for me in a couple of months. Thanks!

I've just finished my first capstone which was sort of like webtoons but I wouldn't say a clone. I learned so much in a relatively short space of time, not just building the app itself but hosting it on cloud servers and debugging. It's now what I'm most proud of as it shows good database integration for populating pages as well as a custom cms system for publishing content. I'm ready to move on to my next project which I'm still working out what to do between a couple options and the only advice I think I could give to someone starting out on a capstone is to just make a start. Some days there's bugs/issues that you just really don't want to deal with but just start and try to get a bit done even if you don't manage multiple hours of work.

this was really useful for me as i was really getting stuck doing this

Great information. Thank you!

Also, real important is to handle asynchronous request and how to handle millions of records each time to be processed. Real world scenarios is to work with a file, load info into database, present group key info in web browser, then request a processed data into a file/report and these reports.

I actually wrote Tetris in C recently, it was a lot of fun and has definitely been a nice touch on my resume!

Hey Andy! Thank you for the tips. As someone who started to learn programming many times, and usually stopping because of having no idea how to build the projects I had in mind, your video helped me realize that the problem was most likely that I was thinking too big. For the simple projects, you showcased some examples, which used some basic GUI. From what I've seen so far, this would require learning some kind of windowing or web library / framework to achieve. However, you said we shouldn't use libraries or frameworks. Could you expand on this part? I assume you meant that we shouldn't learn a library or framework extensively at this point, just some of their most basic functionality.

I think the content of this video is amazing! I'm building an api now together with a website and app.

I wanted to build a checkbook register for tracking expenses. With a flat database and single monetary transactions per entry it was an intermediate project. Adding the ability for split entries with multiple transactions per entry brought it up to capstone level.

For a list of examples of every type of project, head over to this link on GitHub: github.com/andysterks/three-levels-of-projects Also; have you considered liking and subscribing? If not totally cool...just maybe go on up there or use this handy link to subscribe: ru-vid.com/show-UCZ9qFEC82qM6Pk-54Q4TVWA

This was a great video Andy

I haven't looked for a job for the last 23 years or so but when I was applying back in the day, I brought an example program that I wrote which was a C++ version of Space Invaders.

I still have my Intro to Computer Science Projects from College, they didn't have any UI whatsoever (besides terminal prompt), but after the third project, they are all well above 1000 lines of code, last one was 2,132 lines of code. (All build in Java)

Wow this was a really good video! Thanks bro.

thanks Andy, it's really great

Wow i feel confident about my skills now when you said Tetris is challenging because I've done it before in C# and i must say that I also felt like giving up due to the bugs that i ran into,

you really dropped some gems in this one!

We had a project in my university, that made us create a digital circuit on a breadboard, and the circuit would be made from a txt file. So I would type the gate type, column, input 1 and 2 and the output,and I'd get the result. That could give me any circuit I wanted. Of course first I had a class for every gate.

Thanks for sharing!

Sooo well explained !

I'm a bit late to this video, but i believe it would be great to know the thought process on how to start each project. As an example, building a calculator, what program/language do you choose to build it in and most importantly why? Would you do it in phyton exclusively or would you choose something else? Im gonna check out your channel entirely to see if you already posted the answer to my question, but if not, it would be a great help. I find that the most difficult thing is choosing/building the correct setup before even starting coding

very helpful video, thanks!

Super content :) Thank you for the information. :)

Great thanks to you, I believe that you are one of the most reliable and useful person in this platform. Let me ask something, what about building some projects by watching vidoes, copy his/her code, get the idea about what is going on in each line????

Great topic, thanks 👍

Good looks brother you got me going there... I have 3 capstone

This channel is really good man

Great video. Thank you.

That's really helpful!

You gave me some great ideas ❤️❤️

Awesome video. Thanks .

when I originally started my project for my degree, I thought it was a simple project. Listening to your video I've realised it's slightly more complex, somewhere between intermediate to capstone. All I know is it's exiting, and driving me nuts at the same time.

That's the way. I haven't done any yet but I can sense it.

This was the video. This is the clarity

Okay so I made an app in swift where you can put in the time you slept last night and the time you woke up and store that as an entry things this app does: 1. calculate the time slept 2. get the average time slept of the last seven days 3. graph the time slept of the last seven day 4. keeps all this data stored in a firestore database 5. has authentication to keep track of users 6. presents all of your entries in an easy to read list 7. allows users to easily delete entries they may not want 8. uses swift and google and firebase libraries and frameworks 9. is around 812 lines of code would this fit more under capstone category or intermediate category? I know it's a relatively common project Idea but I'm curious what this would fit under. I'm thinking somewhere in-between but more towards the intermediate side

I am currently making a full stack e-commence app. I have the back end for a simple chat app, and when I mean simple I mean the user enters their chat name and the room they want to join. I plan on building the front-end using React or some sort template engine such as mustache. Would this be a good project to add to my portfolio?

Very informative video!

great video this is what iam actually doing and it turned to be right thanks

I really need to get started on this :P most of the time i just do simple projects and maybe intermediate ones. Definitely need some capstone or actual apps that useable and get my foot in the field :P

I remember my 1st quarter of software dev at a community college many years ago, my end of quarter project was building a calculator app, I failed miserably.

amazing project idea.

so helpful, thanks

Really cool resource.

thank you for the tips im trying to be a web developer so thank you for the idea

@andy sterkowitz You have absolutely no idea how helpful this was, I really had no good concept of how to prove and accurately rate my usefulness🙏🏽

Andy! What type of monitor arms are you using for your monitors? Your build in the back looks clean and I have similar monitors.

Loved it!

Thanks Andy

For some reason, I feel like I know at least where to start with most intermediate projects mentioned, but not simple UIs mentioned like the to-do list 😭

Someone struggling with ADHD..you soo much inspire me

Thanks for giving this idea beacuse its very good guiedline

my first project i consider a capstone project. I made a discord bot for my first project (in java). It gave me a good start and let me add to it as i learned more. It started with Maven, Imports, If else statements and ended with mean learning how to use the Jackson API to webscrap. My dice rolling script was the WORST thing you'd ever see btw. Side note, anyone know any good imageboard websites?