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3 min read

What Projects to Do as a Beginner Programmer

Published on: June 6, 2024

Learning programming or in general just learning a new language is hard. Do projects!

Introduction

When you start learning programming it’s really easy to get stuck at a level called the Tutorial Hell. It means that the person watches tutorial after tutorial and with this method they can’t really progress. To master programming you also need practice and that’s when projects come into the view.

How do you practice? By writing code. What code? Build a project!

Learning New Languages

Currently I am learning the Go programming language. I know that I need to start doing things and not just watch or read content about it, but at first I didn’t know either what to exactly do.

I get it, projects. But what type of projects? Can’t just somebody give me a list? No, they can’t. You have to pick your own projects.

Searching up “Top beginner programming projects for [LANGUAGE]” in it’s own won’t help you. As I scanned through these lists I noticed that most projects are too plain and annoyingly boring. No wonder why lots of (especially non-tech) people find learning programming hard.

What Projects Should You Do

I think there is a middle ground for learning through practicing by doing projects. You need to do few basic ones and more fun ones.

The basic ones may be boring but they help you practice the basics and specialities of the programming language. Fun projects can be anything you find interesting to do and which you can stay motivated by.

The whole point of practicing is just to get used to programming or the programming language in general. The thing you must do is explore. Exploration is the most important thing. No matter what project you decide on doing, you need to explore the language. How to do that? Ask lots of questions and find the answers to them. For example: what happens if I don’t do this line here, but I move it up few lines or I heard about X in a video, how can I do that here or what are the best practices I could instead use here.