19 Fun Coding Project Ideas to Build a Portfolio in 2023
Learning coding is all about practicing and building different coding projects. Learning programming concepts separately without building an actual project might be useless as you would forget whatever concept you learned if you don’t put these concepts into practice.
Coding projects are a great resource for people with no professional experience. They offer a fantastic platform to showcase one’s proficiency to potential employers. Additionally, constructing a robust portfolio through these projects is a practical guide, proving your capabilities and skills in the field.
If you are looking for places to learn to code, check out my article on the best coding platform people use to find the best tutorials and courses.
How to Use This Guide
Choosing a coding project to work on can be overwhelming with the many options available. To make it easier, here are some suggestions on selecting the right project for your coding skill level, interests, and desired learning outcomes.
- Look at the skills required: (Mobile developer, Front-end developer, or Backend developer, etc)
- Check the difficulty Level: (Beginner or Intermediate)
- Concept to learn: Check which programming concept these projects help you to learn (Caching, text search, Authentication, etc.)
Note:
Coding projects such as food orders are a good choice if you want to learn how to do a text search. Or, if you want to learn about dates and times, you can go for the Date calculator project.
Best Coding project ideas to practice
1- Spin the Wheel
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Random number generator, Array manipulation
Overview:
Spin the Wheel is a fun coding project you can use from scratch with friends. Imagine you and your friends are having a night out, and you are all fighting about who should choose which movie to watch, well with the project you’ve built, you can enter your friends’ names and let the application choose the winner. It is a good project starter to learn how to code.
Use Cases:
This project will help me learn how to generate numbers between two given numbers. In addition, you are going to learn how to add and remove elements from arrays.
2- Countdown Timer
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development, Backend Development, and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Timing Events
Overview:
Building a countdown timer is a simple yet effective project for beginners. This project allows you to apply fundamental programming concepts and time manipulation in a practical context.
Use Cases:
Build an application where the user sets a countdown. Let’s say the user enters 1 min. Your application should display the counter every second, like “00:59” then “00:58” and so on. This project will teach you how to run code on interval timing.
3- Date calculator
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development, Backend development, and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Date and time Manipulation
Overview:
Working with dates is essential in software development. I worked with dates and time on 100% of projects in my professional experience. Thus, every programmer should know how to work with dates and how to manipulate them. Build an application where you compare the difference between two dates and get the difference in years, months, days, hours, etc.
Use Cases:
How to calculate your age when you were born on a leap year. This could be very tricky, and not everyone gets it right. Learn to calculate age and handle leap year cases.
4- Chat App
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Backend development & (Web development or Mobile development)
Concept to learn: IO Socket (Real-Time App)
Overview:
A chat app is a perfect coding project, especially for backend engineers. It will help you learn about Real-Time applications where the data will come to the client from the server without request.
Use Cases:
Learn how the chat app receives messages without refreshing the page.
5- Random Password Generator
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development, Backend development, and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Random Word Generator & working with configuration
Overview:
How to randomly generate words is a good project to practice as a beginner. This will help you work with configurations. In your professional career, you will encounter a lot of cases where you will need to work with configurations; thus, this project is a good start.
Use Case:
Learn how to work with user customization, where users choose if they want lowercase, uppercase, number, and symbols on their password. Generate a password based on user configuration and analyze the strength of the password.
6- To-do app
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development, Backend development, and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Database operation CRUD
Overview:
The Todo app is the most common idea out there. I recommend building a whole project with a database to learn the basic CURD operation. CRUD stands for create, read, update, and delete. This is a good starting point for people who want to learn backend development.
Use Cases:
Learn how to create, read, update, and delete a database record.
7- Calculator
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Math operation & String Manipulation
Overview:
The calculator was the first project I ever built when I was learning to code. It is a perfect project for beginners to learn about string manipulation and math operations. It is a challenging project, especially on how to handle user input.
Use Case:
The trick with building a calculator is to handle users’ input. Let’s say a user enter ” (3 * 4) + 8 ” How are you going to handle input to return ” 20 ” as a result. It is a great way to learn about string manipulation.
8- Guess the Number Game
Difficulty Level: Beginners
Skills Required: Front-end development and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Random number generator
Overview:
Basic fun game to learn how to generate a random number between two numbers. Easy and basic beginner coding project that can be done within a few hours. A good option for absolute beginner coders.
Use case:
Enter two numbers and let the computer generate a random number—for example, between 5 to 10. Then let the user guess which number the computer has chosen.
9- Image Compression
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Backend development, Front-end development, and Mobile development
Concept to learn: Working with images
Overview:
Some websites will require you to upload some photos but with a maximum size limit. The solution is to comprise your photo and reduce its size to be able to upload the image. Build an API to reduce the photo size and download the new optimized photo.
Use Case:
Learn how to use image libraries to help you reduce image size.
10- Booking System
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Backend development
Concept to learn: Concurrency Control
Overview:
A booking system is one of the best coding project ideas you can use to build your portfolio. Its complexity will teach you many programming skills and widen your knowledge as a backend developer. The main thing to learn from this project is concurrency control and how to prevent double booking.
Use Case:
Imagine using a hotel booking system and a room is available next Friday. Two different customers open the application and choose to book the room simultaneously. They both click the book button simultaneously. Will the system be able to handle this situation, or will it create a double booking and cause a major issue when the customers arrive at the hotel? It’s important to learn about concurrency control to avoid such problems.
11- Tic tac toe
Difficulty Level: Beginner
Skills Required: Front-end development or Mobile Development
Concept to learn: Arrays, 2D Arrays & State management.
Overview:
A Tic Tac Toe game is a classic coding project that can help you develop a strong foundation in algorithms. It’s a simple game that can be built with basic programming knowledge, and yet, it’s engaging enough to keep both the player and the developer interested. From this project, you will learn important concepts like game logic, control structures, and array manipulation.
Use Case:
How can you use an array to represent the grid? How can you check whether a player has won or not? How do you ensure that a player doesn’t overwrite the mark of the other player? You will solve These types of problems when you build a Tic Tac Toe game. The project will give you a practical understanding of how real-world software applications use control structures and arrays.
12- Expense Tracker
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Frontend and Backend Development, Database Management
Concept to learn: CRUD Operations, Data Persistence, Data Visualization
Overview:
An expense tracker is a practical coding project that can enhance your full-stack development skills. This project will allow you to work on frontend and backend technologies and help you understand the importance of database management. The main concepts to learn from this project are CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations and data persistence.
Use Case:
Expenses tracker apps are all about visualizations; learn how to use charts to display data for the users to summarize their expenses.
13- Split money
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Frontend and Backend Development, Database Management
Concept to learn: CRUD Operations, Data Persistence, Algorithmic Thinking
Overview:
A Split Money app is a fantastic project idea that can improve your full-stack development skills. Splitting expenses among a group is quite common, and coding an app to facilitate this can be a great learning experience. The primary concepts to learn from this project are CRUD operations, data persistence, and complex algorithmic thinking.
Use Case:
Imagine going on a road trip with 3 of your friends. You paid for car rent and gas, another friend paid for the hotel, and someone else paid for food. Now who owns who money?
Building an application similar to the SplitWise app is a good project for learning about database design and complex algorithmic thinking.
14- Video Player
Difficulty Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Skills Required: Frontend Development, Understanding of Media Formats
Concept to learn: Media Handling, User Interface Design, Browser APIs
Overview:
Creating a video player is an excellent project idea that provides an opportunity to dive deep into front-end development and media handling. This project involves understanding different video formats, how to control media playback, and how to create a user-friendly interface. The key concepts to learn from this project are media handling and manipulation, browser APIs, and user interface design.
Use Case:
Consider a scenario where you want to watch a video on your computer. You’d want interactive features like play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, and maybe even options to control the volume and display settings like full screen. Now, imagine creating a web-based video player with all these functionalities.
You’ll need to build a user interface with buttons for these controls and then use JavaScript (and possibly the HTML5 video API) to control the video playback based on user interaction. You might also want to add a progress bar to show how far through the video you are and allow the user to click on the progress bar to skip to different parts of the video.
15- Subscription System
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Backend Development & Front-end Development
Concept to learn: Third-Party API Integration, Secure Payment Processing, WebHook
Overview:
Creating a subscription system using Stripe is an excellent advanced project that can significantly enhance your backend development skills. This project will provide hands-on experience with third-party API integration, specifically the Stripe API for payment processing. The primary concepts to learn from this project are secure payment processing and webhooks.
Use Case:
Consider a scenario where you’re running an online service that offers premium features via a subscription. Users should be able to select a subscription plan, input their payment details, and make recurring payments. Furthermore, they should be able to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel their subscription anytime. This coding project is going to teach you about “Webhooks.”
Webhook is when an event happens somewhere outside your website, and you want to take action upon this event. Example: A user subscribes to your website. The payment occurred on the third-party payment gateway. The payment gateway will notify your webhook about the successful payment, and your webhook will take action upon this event.
16- Web Scraping
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Backend Development
Concept to learn: Web Scraping, Data Extraction, and Manipulation
Overview:
Web scraping is a versatile project idea that can expand your knowledge in python programming language, data extraction, and manipulation. This project involves understanding the structure of web pages and how to extract useful information from them programmatically. The key concepts to learn from this project are web scraping techniques, data extraction, and potentially working with APIs if the website provides one.
Use Case:
Consider a scenario where you want to track the prices of a product across different e-commerce websites for price comparison. Instead of manually visiting each site, you can create a web scraper that automatically visits these sites, extracts the required information (product name, price, etc.), and saves or displays it in a user-friendly format.
17- IMDB API
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Front-end Development
Concept to learn: Consume API, Deployment, Social media share
Overview:
IMDB is a movie-related website where users share and rate their favorite movies. Use their API to build your favorite movies and your rating.
Use Case:
Build a single app application to list your best movies and rating, and deploy your application on Vercel or Firebase. Learn how to “add Share to social media feature.” share your list with your friends and let your friends share theirs.
18- Weather Map API
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Skills Required: Frontend and Backend Development, API Integration
Concept to learn: Third-Party API Integration, GPS, Data Visualization
Overview:
Creating a Weather Map App is a rewarding project that introduces you to the intricacies of API integration and data visualization. Using APIs from weather services, you can create a dynamic app that provides real-time weather information based on a user’s location or input. Key concepts to learn from this project include working with third-party APIs, handling geolocation data, and data visualization.
Use Case:
Imagine an application that provides weather forecasts for any location in the world. Users can enter a city name or use their current site, and the app will display weather data – current temperature, humidity, wind speed, and perhaps even a forecast for the next few days.
To build this, you must integrate a weather services API like OpenWeatherMap or WeatherAPI to fetch weather data. If you decide to include a feature that uses the user’s current location, you’ll need to work with geolocation data, which might involve another API like the Geolocation API. Finally, presenting the fetched data in a user-friendly, visually appealing way introduces you to data visualization.
19- Food order
Difficulty Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Skills Required: Frontend and Backend Development, Database Management
Concept to learn: Text Search, User Interface Design, CRUD Operations
Overview:
Developing a food ordering app can be a remarkable project to expand your front-end and back-end development skills, particularly in implementing text search functionality. This app would allow users to browse a variety of dishes, place an order, and track their order status. The main concept to learn from this project is implementing a robust text search, which can enhance the user experience significantly.
Use Case:
Imagine an app where users can view a list of available dishes, search for a specific word or cuisine, add items to their cart, and place an order. For example, a user might want to search for “pizza” and see all the pizza options available.
To build this, you’ll need a database of dishes and a front end where users can interact with this data. The text search functionality can be as simple as matching user input with dish names.
When you use food delivery apps and type “Pizza” they show you every pizza result even though the word does not match the food title. For example, “Pizza” does not equal “Pizza Chees” How does the system return this result if it is not equal? This concept is called “Full-Text Search.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, all these various projects discussed in this article represent a wide range of complexity and skill requirements, from beginner to advanced levels. Each offers a unique opportunity to learn and practice different programming concepts, from game logic in a Tic Tac Toe game, concurrency control in a booking system, to third-party API integration in a weather map or IMDB API app.
However, merely coding these projects is not enough. To demonstrate your skills and progress to potential employers or clients, it’s important to make your work visible. You’ll need to create a Github profile and upload your code there.
Remember, every project you complete takes you one step closer to becoming a proficient developer. So, start coding, keep learning, and continue adding to your portfolio on GitHub.
Share on the comments which coding project idea you going to build next.
