5 Coding Projects (from beginner to advanced)

I have five programming projects of varying skill level that will help you get to the next level of programming, with the last one being a project that will help you land a software development job. Our three skill levels are, one, beginner. You're learning how to implement programming fundamentals in a practical way. You're very much a beginner, but I'm not gonna make it easy, just straightforward, so it's not so convoluted. I don't want you to have to worry about libraries and frameworks and all of this crap. Your code is gonna run in the console, and because beginner steps are the most important, we actually have three projects of varying skill levels within this level. Two is intermediate. You're dipping your toes in real-world development, where what you work on on these projects will directly transfer over to real-world projects, and you may even learn some software engineering fundamentals as well. And three is advanced. You are learning how to be a full-fledged software engineer, and by that, I mean full stack, but you're still solo. So on this project, the front end doesn't have to be beautiful. The back end may need some refactoring, and your technical debt is probably through the roof, but you're able to display your programming knowledge, you are implementing core principles, and you're also providing documentation that explains your thought process while coding. And the project's so big, you're going to be working like a real software engineer, where you break down this big project into smaller tasks for you to complete, and you create an MVP, you build it up feature by feature into what is finally a full-fledged application. This is going to be fun. Now, there are two ways to go about programming projects. One is to work on a project that's more on the hobby level. This doesn't mean I'm professional, but it's a project that you want to build, like my AI that shot me in the face when I got distracted, as you saw in the last video, or when I use the YouTube data API to pull my dislike counts, put it into a comment, and post that comment under the related video. It's something useful that makes your life easier, or it's just fun. You learn a lot about building projects like this, because when you're genuinely interested in something, you are more inclined to learn about it and less inclined to quit when the going gets tough. And the other way is tactical. You know what you're going to learn from this project, where it's going to get you to the next level, or maybe even a software development job, and that is why you build it. And that's actually going to be my focus for today, because I can't just sit here and say, build something fun. Okay, thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe. And that's the video. I gotta have a little bit of content. But actually, the real reason I'm not going that route, because at the end of the day, if you did have something like that in mind, you probably would be working on it instead of watching this video. I'm just saying. So let's get started with the first project under skill level number one for beginners. What you're going to do is write a program that displays Hello World in the console. All right, thank you for watching this video. You are ready to become a software engineer, start applying to those jobs. But actually, I want you to create Hello World, because there's something that just builds up inside you when you're able to manipulate a computer using code to do something that you want it to do, especially for the first time ever. So if you have never touched a line of code, do Hello World, because it just makes you so giddy and excited for programming even more than you already are. And now that you're excited, you're going to move on to the next project in the beginner skill level, cooking. Bear with me real quick. This is actually what I'm talking about. You're going to be implementing programming basics by using information of cooking a lasagna. How long did it take you to prepare that lasagna? How long does it take to cook that lasagna? How much time does that lasagna have left to cook? So you're going to be working with data types. You're going to be working with functions or methods, whatever, whatever language. You can do this in any language that you want, really. And you're going to be working with parameters and a little bit of math, and using some functions and other functions just to see how everything ties together. And I know what you're thinking. Oh, well, this isn't your original idea. I know. Nobody's beginner project ideas are their own original idea. And also, I feel like this was a two birds, one stone situation where I can kind of plug exorcism. Not the sponsor of the video, by the way. API Layers actually sponsored the video, but we'll get to that later. Exorcism is just a really cool place to learn a lot of different languages. It's all open source. It's all free. Figured I'd mention it. So this is a project. You're going to define the expected oven time in minutes. How long does that lasagna take to cook? Does it take 40 minutes in the oven? Well, that's the example that we use here. So you need to declare data type, and you're going to assign it the value of 40. And yes, I'm going to speak a little bit in pseudocode in this project in particular because it is a very beginner basics project. But as we go and climb up the ladder of varying skill levels, I'm going to be going in less and less detail because you'll know more and more. But that's it for task one. The next one, calculate the remaining oven time in minutes. And this really bothers me how this one is before the preparation time because you definitely prepare the lasagna before you put it in the oven, but whatever. We'll just follow the order. But you're implementing a function or method to calculate the remaining oven time in minutes. So this function's whole idea is how much longer is this lasagna in the oven? Well, how do you do that? Well, you know how long it's supposed to be in the oven already. You declared that in the first task. And then how long has it already been in the oven? You're going to actually be entering that as a parameter. And then what you're going to return is the remaining oven time in minutes. And the third task is actually very similar to the second task, where you're going to be implementing a function that passes in a parameter. In order to return, we'll calculate the preparation time in minutes. That's what you're going to be returning. How long did it take you to prepare? So how are you going to do that? Well, the parameter is you're taking the number of layers you added to the lasagna and multiplying that, oh crap, I just gave away the answer, by two minutes to prepare each layer. So if you have five layers, well, two minutes per layer, that number is what you're going to want to return from this function. Like that's the whole purpose of this function is to get to that number. But then it all comes full circle to the fourth task right here. You're implementing another function that calculates the total working time in minutes, but this one takes two parameters. It actually takes the same exact parameters as these two functions right here. You need the number of layers you added to the lasagna and you need the number of minutes the lasagna has been in the oven because you want to return how long you've been working on this thing. So how long did it take to prepare? By the way, this is where you use one of the other functions inside this function. So how long did it take you to prepare? How long has it already been in the oven? You add those together and that's what you return. And that's it. If you're a little confused about some of the things that I was talking about, then this is the project for you. Remember, you're not supposed to already know how to do this project. You're doing this project to learn. If you already know how to do it, what are you gonna learn? But if that seemed a little easy to you, well, you may know where I'm going with this if you've been watching my videos this year. The tournament simulation. Whatever sport you like best. This can be surfing. It can be wrestling. It could be baseball. It could be football. It could be whatever, as long as there are brackets. Tournament style. It could be March Madness. Did I say basketball? It could be March Madness. Whatever you want. Simulate running a tournament. Remember, all of this is still happening in the console. Simulate running a tournament for that sport. Come up with a loose design plan so when you hit the keyboard and you're about to program things out, you have an overall understanding of what's going on. It can be something as simple as this. You have to figure out what are the objects, what are their attributes, what are their behaviors, and then you figure it out. What are the objects? Let's pretend this is surfers. I don't wanna just regurgitate everything I said before. Let's say surfing. So you're gonna have surfers and then you're gonna have the overarching tournament. You're going to have heats in that tournament of two to four surfers per heat. You're going to have scores and records and you're gonna have a schedule. Then the attributes of a surfer. Now we can split this up. Shortboard, longboard, big wave surfing, small wave surfing. It doesn't have to be super realistic, but you can have giant waves over here, longboard waves over here, shortboard waves over here on the same beach. It's a program. You can make whatever you want. I don't wanna go too deep into the surfing thing because I don't know how many of y'all surf or even know what the hell I'm talking about, but whatever your favorite sport is, again, you're already familiar with that. So the more you know about what you're programming, the more you can focus on actually programming it. This is a program where you will implement basically anything that comes to mind when you think of programming fundamentals. All of the simple things like we just discussed, data types and functions or methods, but also data structures and some algorithms and object oriented programming with classes and different objects. And you'll be working with inheritance, right? All of this in one simple program. So if you are past the cooking your lasagna program, then this is gonna be your next step. But if you have the fundamentals down and feel you're ready to hop on over to web development, then we're gonna hop into the intermediate section. The one project for the intermediate section, it's actually an array of projects, but it's one common theme and that it is brought to you by API Layer who is a sponsor of today's video. And you're able to use their product to help you build these web applications. That's what this entire project is going to be based around. Building a web application, using an API to pull in data that you can then manipulate and display however you wish on the front end. Similar to how you see this right here. This was a little program I put together, I was gonna make a video about, then I realized maybe it's not as interesting as I thought to count down to the bottom of the recession based on previous averages from peak to bottom, yada, yada, yada. But I had the countdown timer here and I have the big three right here. Dow Jones, SAP 500, NASDAQ, with this price being pulled in using an API and then doing a little bit of math based on the all-time high to find the difference. And that's just one of many examples of what you can do using an API. An API courtesy of API Layer, a hassle-free API marketplace to boost your app's capabilities without worrying about scalability and stability. They have a litany of different types of APIs. They have a code detection API, a resume parser. We can see all APIs and see all 84 that they currently have for most of what you would need. And also one thing that is incredibly important, they have 99.98% uptime. Let me tangent real quick, because I have a story. I was using a different API for that recession day stock project that I just showed y'all before I moved over to API Layer. And I spent two hours messing with the code that calls the API because it wasn't working. When you first connect the API, you wanted to display it in the developer console just to make sure that it's working. So when you work on this project, there's a little tip for you and it wasn't working. Like, why isn't this working? What is wrong with my code? Two hours later, I decided I'm going to test it out on a different site where you can actually test these APIs. Turns out the API was down. You have never seen me so mad. I couldn't believe it. I had just wasted two hours for something that wasn't even my fault. My code was correct. The API was down. That's why this number right here, uptime of 99.98% is so important. It'll save you a lot of headache. I can speak on it personally. And also, all of these APIs are free up to a certain limit. However, for the first 100 individuals that use my code, Forrest100, using my link, all that information will be in the description just below this video. Get everything 100% free up to $250. But again, for the first 100 people to use my code for the first month. Did I say that? For the first month. But let's talk about the projects that you can build with this. So the first one we're going to talk about is MarketStack. Yes, this is a real-time, intraday, and historical market data API that if you click on it, brings you over to marketstack.com because this is like a subsidiary. It's under the umbrella of API layer. It's created by API layer. So they gave it its own dedicated website, I guess. And just to make sure before you go implementing it, you can search the stock tickers in which you're interested. So if you need Apple, you get Apple. If you need NASDAQ, you can use this API to pull in this stock market data to create an application like I just showed you or anything else that suits your fancy when it comes to stock market data. The next project is using the Spoonacular API, which allows you to access over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products. I wanted to mention this one because we talked about cooking lasagna earlier using a recipe, so it kind of fit the theme. And a cool thing about this API in particular is that it has all special diets and intolerances. So if the recipe is vegan, vegetarian, paleo, yada, yada, yada, it has that information and automatically analyze the recipes to check ingredients for that and for allergens. Nutritional information, so on and so forth. And one really cool web application idea would be basically this right here. I mean, you can plan your meals and whatever, but imagine if you had a recipe and you could automatically generate a grocery list based on the food that you need to create that recipe. Well, this API allows you to do that, but also that would just be a cool idea for a web application. And another one is Weatherstack. Yes, Weatherstack, this one is also under the umbrella of API Layer, and it is a real-time weather API, historical weather API, and weather forecast API. And you can do anything. This is a very common project to pull in weather data and print out all of the real-time historical and weather forecasts. Look at this library of APIs, see what you find interesting that you can build something fun with, and then go with that. Don't build something boring. Build something that you would genuinely enjoy and just kind of scroll through here and see what you'd like. So that's the intermediate project. And if you're worried about what tech stack and frameworks to use, do a little bit of research. I would recommend maybe MernStack if you have no preference, just because there's a lot of information out there for when you get stuck to reference. And there's also something else that I would like to point out, and that is the fact of recommended tool chains for React. So if you're creating a new single-page application, you can use Create React App, or for a server-rendered website with Node.js, you can try Next.js, or a static content-oriented website, you can try Gatsby. I'm gonna focus on Create React App because it's just a new single-page app. The cool thing about it is the simple fact that you do not have to worry about the file structure and the boilerplate. It generates all of that for you, so you are sitting there in your IDE, or text editor, ready to code. You're taking the path of least resistance so you can focus on the topic at hand. It's also another reason why you're using an API, so you don't have to worry about all the data. Here, you don't have to worry about all the file structure. You just worry about programming. That's it. Now let's talk about the advanced project. The advanced project that I recommend that will absolutely help you get a software development job is some sort of management system. Now, there are varying different types of management systems. There's a content management system, a library management system, a bank management system. There's also one that people recommend, a healthcare management system, but I couldn't think of anything more dreadful than to create something related to the healthcare industry. That's your thing, that's your thing. But a management system that suits your fancy, that you find interesting. The reason being is because you want to create something large enough where you basically have to implement a microservice architecture for it to actually turn out well that has multiple different components, especially considering the fact that it's easy to picture these management systems because whether you realize it or not, you've probably used one. So you know how it's structured. And like I said in the beginning of this video, you're going to have to break down such a big project like this into smaller, well, smaller stories, and then the stories into smaller tasks. So you'll obviously show your programming knowledge, but you'll also show your knowledge of microservices architecture or something similar. And you'll also show your knowledge of some software engineering fundamentals where you'll probably throw this in like a Kanban board or something along those lines to keep it more organized and basically work as if you were a software engineer as a part of a team. And if it were me, I'm actually considering creating a content management system. I'm also considering implementing an interactive code editor element to that content management system. What could that ever be used for? I'm not sure. Or I'm just going to outsource it and then hire somebody else to do it. I haven't yet to decide, but I assume we'll find out by the end of the year. Y'all may find out first quarter of 2023. We'll see. I hate making promises. Anyway, some sort of management system that I previously laid out, because you will not only show the employer about those elements that, you know, microservices and the software engineering fundamentals, as well as your programming knowledge, but you also strengthen all of those so you truly understand it so that you can actually talk about it in an interview and show it off in a project. And I did tell you that as we went up in skill level, that I was going to be less and less specific and less and less detailed about the particular project. So that's it for this video. I hope you found some value out of it. Maybe some ideas were sparked in your head on what project you need to build in order to get to that next level of programming. If so, leave a like on the video, subscribe, you know, all the typical YouTuber crap, and I'll see y'all in the next one.