Introduction

The secret to becoming a good developer is to express your creativity into coding. In the world of coding, you can become a beginner after 1000 days of practice but master the discipline after 10,000 days of practice. According to Matthew Davies, you have to spend a lot of time behind your keyboard and get your hands dirty if you want to become a great developer someday.

The Ideas

Here are some things that you can build for fun as a developer:

1. Building Pac-Man - If you have a good knowledge of the JavaScript framework then you can make Pac-Man. Building Pac-Man is quite simple and you will come to know how the games are developed. From a beginner’s perspective, building Pac-Man can be a very fun experience. While developing Pac-Man, you can learn several new things such as the movement of entities, detection of keys being pressed, collision detection, and how to go the extra mile by adding steering behavior to the ghost.

2. An app for checking the weather at your location - You can build an app for checking the weather at your location. You can make such apps in Swift as it is one of the best software for beginners who want to create apps. While developing a weather app, you will learn how to interact with an API, use geolocation, etc. You can make this app more dynamic if you build the app in a way that allows the user to enter their location for finding out the weather of that particular location. For making a weather app, you will need to use weather data which you can easily get from OpenWeather API.  

3. Building Chatbox - Another great thing to build as a beginner is a chatbox. Making a chatbox is the best way to learn how socket works and how to implement a socket. For building such a project you can work on Laravel as it has an expressive and elegant syntax.

4. Making GitLab CI - You can also build GitLab CI if you are new to Continuous Integration (CI). While making this project, you can set up multiple environments and you must attempt to test those projects that are running in your pipeline. It is certainly a great tool to develop. Developing this project will help you to learn GitLab CI in-depth, configure .gitlab-ci.yml and deploy it to other environments.

5. Mining social media sentiment - Working on a project for mining social media sentiment is certainly a great way to learn about machine learning. You can begin this project by just mining one social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook. When you develop more experience in machine learning you can easily try to mine other social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Once you become an expert in machine learning you can also combine the data of various social media platforms to gain new insights.

Conclusion

These are some fun projects that you can work on as a developer. According to Matthew Davis, developers must work on practical projects to hone their skills. Theoretical knowledge is not enough to improve their understanding.