Most people think they don't know enough to start building a project, so they decide to watch or read tutorials for months. However, building projects improves one's coding skills because learning by creating stuff is more efficient.
To help you get over tutorial hell, I curated 15 programming project ideas for web developers. This article covers project ideas for frontend, backend, and full-stack web developers.
Frontend 🎖️
Here are some project ideas if you're looking to improve your skills in front-end technologies:
Color box guesser game
The color guesser game is a simple game that allows players to guess the background color of a box on the page.
The app starts by creating a number of boxes with different colors based on the user input. Once the game starts, the color boxes are flipped over, and their colors are hidden.
Every round, the game shuffles the positions of the color boxes. After shuffling, one of the colors is shown on the screen, and the player is asked to guess which of the color boxes has the color displayed by clicking on it.
The player wins the game if he can guess the colors correctly. Below is a sample mockup of the app. 👇🏽
Working on this game will improve your knowledge of DOM (Document Object Model), and functions in JavaScript.
Music playlist app
If you have ever thought of creating a combined playlist of songs you and your friends think are cool, then this may be an interesting project idea for you.
In this project, you can build a simple user interface that will allow you and anyone else to add a song to your playlist. Working on this project will deepen your understanding of DOM event handlers in JavaScript and in whatever framework you're learning. e.g., React.
Number Guessing Game app
The number guessing game app is another interesting project idea for anyone looking to grow their front-end development skills.
The app will provide a number between a certain minimum number and a certain maximum number. For example, the random number between 1 and 10 is 6.
The user is then supposed to guess that number within a specific number of attempts. The player loses the game if they don't get it right after the specified number of attempts.
Character count app
If you've used Twitter before, you will know that Twitter has a maximum number of characters for each tweet. For this project idea, you will be building something similar to that.
For this app idea, you will provide a text field that allows a user to type in. As the user types, the number of characters typed so far is displayed on the screen. But much more than that, the background color of the app changes based on the number of characters below. 👇🏽
0 - 10: black
11 - 20: red
21 - 30: yellow
Above 31: green
This project idea will strengthen your knowledge of events in JavaScript, build your algorithms, and help grow your knowledge of CSS.
Image slider app
This project idea is about building an image slider app, something similar to the imager slide on Instagram. The app will have a list of images that change after a number of seconds, using a sliding transition, something similar to a carousel.
For those interested in making this more complex, you can implement arrow buttons for direction to allow the user to move forward or backward instead of following the default transition.
This is a fascinating project idea because you will learn a lot about asynchronous operations in JavaScript like setInterval while strengthening your CSS knowledge from the transitions implemented.
Back-end 🎖️
For those who are more interested in project ideas that leverage back-end technologies, here are a couple;
Simple Web Crawler
A web crawler is an application that indexes the content of a page. This project idea centers around building a simple web crawler service that takes a page URL and returns the HTML markup of that page.
This project is not language-specific and can be implemented in any language, from Node. js to Python. Working on this project will help deepen your knowledge on how to build APIs and services.
Anagram generator API
An Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word. For example, priest and stripe are anagrams because each word is formed from the rearrangement of the letters of the other.
The anagram generator API will take in a source word, for example, priest, and return all the anagrams for that word.
Working on this project will deepen your knowledge of building services and strengthen your knowledge of algorithms.
Covid stats API
This project is about leveraging the existing data about the COVID-19 and creating a restful endpoint to serve this data.
Working on this project will strengthen your knowledge of what constitutes a good API, and at the same time, you will learn about how to define the structure of an API response.
Random name generator API
A simple API to generate a random name every time the API is called. This service can be useful to people who are looking to name their newly born children.
Browser version API
This project idea is about building a back-end service that provides detailed browser information about the browser that initiated the request.
Full-stack 🎖️
Sometimes you don't want to limit your learning to just the front-end or just the back-end. If you are looking to grow your competencies in both front-end and back-end, below are a number of interesting project ideas:
Simple Chat Messaging app
One interesting project you can work on to improve your front-end and back-end skills is a chat messaging app.
It doesn't need to have sophisticated features like sharing images, but it should have the ability for one user to send a message to another user.
Being able to implement this offers many learning opportunities in a wide range of technologies, including WebSockets.
Travel Bucket List app
If you have a list of places where you would like to travel to, then it might be a good idea to work on this project which basically is an app that allows you to add a new place of interest to your bucket list.
Motivational Quotes app
We all need some motivation in our lives. So, building an app that sends you and your friend's random motivational quotes is spot on! You should definitely try building this.
Twitter Clone
I bet you already know Twitter. Building a Twitter clone is a good way to improve your frontend and backend skills.
You don't have to build all the features of Twitter into this clone. Just the basic functionalities of Twitter will be a perfect way to improve your web development skill.
Project management dashboard
The idea here is to build a tool that helps you manage projects. I believe this is an interesting idea because you can also benefit from using it to manage your projects as well.
Working on this project will help you understand how to implement CRUD operations, and also improve your CSS skills since you have to build a dashboard.
Conclusion
Before I end this article, I will leave you with an amazing quote I discovered last year that really spoke to me. 👇🏽
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. - Arthur Ashe.
Arthur Ashe encourages us to:
Start where we are: This means you don't have to watch all the tutorials in the world before you start building projects. Just start where you are!
Use what you have: With the current knowledge you have, you can definitely build something. So, use what you have and build a project no matter how small it is.
Do what you can: No matter how small the project is, do what you can with the current skill you have!
I hope you discovered an interesting project idea in this article. Now, go forth and build projects!