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Choose an Idea
The whole point of a personal project is that it's personal. The idea needs to be yours, and ideally, it will leverage data that you have special access to, or that you're uniquely interested in.
- Google trends data for your favorite movies
- Your game history from Dota 2 games
- Your journal entries from the last year
- Your stock portfolio data
- Your fantasy football league information
- Your magic the gathering deck lists
- etc.
You can scrape data from the web, download it in CSV format, or even manually aggregate it in a Google sheet! Whatever is easiest for you and makes the most sense for your project.
How Do I Choose an Idea?
Use a programming language that you're already at least somewhat familiar with. Assuming you haven't been writing a ton of code outside of Boot.dev, your project should probably be a Python or Node.js program that runs on the command line. That's fine!
But I Don't Know How to Build X!!!
Your job as a developer is to constantly build stuff that you've never built before. Don't shy away from an idea because you're not sure where to start. Google it. Ask ChatGPT. Ask the Boot.dev Discord community. You might need to put in an hour of research before starting to decide if your idea is feasible within a 40-hour time frame, but that's fine!
Assume that you'll be doing something you've never done before! You have some fundamentals under your belt. Now it's time to piece it all together and research as you go.