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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. It's time to fly closer to the sun and break out of tutorial hell. Even if the project you build is simple for now, at least it's yours.

Build something that you find interesting.

This probably isn't a project that will make its way onto your portfolio or resume, but it's still good to get into the habit of building things that are interesting and useful. Interesting and useful projects have many benefits:

  • They're more fun to work on

  • They have more interesting and difficult problems to solve

  • You (or someone else) might actually use them

  • They're more likely to grab the attention of other people

  • Attention from other people can lead to career opportunities

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 program that runs on the command line. That's fine!

I want to provide a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing, but please don't choose a project from this list without at least putting your own spin on it

  • A text-based adventure game in the terminal

  • A CLI tool to detect the strength of a password, or to validate it

  • Tic-Tac-Toe in a tkinter GUI

  • A tool that creates ASCII art from an image

  • A command line tool to view Reddit feeds in the terminal

  • A command line tool that parses a CSV file of pokemon data and lets you search for pokemon by name, type, etc.

Here are some excellent projects from other students to inspire you:

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.