My advice is not to settle for a toy/theoretical project. These often lead you to develop things in a way that theoretical humans "should" want to use and theoretical developers "should" want to maintain. But not actual humans and developers. :) Make something that you find useful.
One personal project I did for practical reasons was to do a financial forecast. I never did strict budgets and balancing. For many years I was basically paycheck-to-paycheck, and I observed that some months seemed to have surplus and some shortage. So I wanted a tool to put in my bills with their due dates, and income with its frequency, and forecast out arbitrarily far to see what my income vs outgoing was. And ultimately use that information to set a realistic budget on non-essentials. And you can answer other questions like "What if I took a job making X ?" "What if I added a car payment?" "What if I put X into savings?". And from the generated forecast, you can see things like: February is worst month at -$500 total, but Nov is best month at +$600. Avg for a year is +$87.
By now, I'm sure this kind of app already exists. But the journey to make it myself had some interesting challenges. And it was very useful to me, not a toy.
Software developer at Undev studios in Berlin. I create interactive multimedia installations which work in real time. I also love to create art with technology and code.
I think the things that's been stopping me is that I'm always trying to be as "efficient" as possible so I want to work on a project and develop skills from it which will be useful in a work environment. I think I just have to ease that back some and just get started.
If anyone else has some tips for educational resources or projects I'd be more than happy to hear them.
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My advice is not to settle for a toy/theoretical project. These often lead you to develop things in a way that theoretical humans "should" want to use and theoretical developers "should" want to maintain. But not actual humans and developers. :) Make something that you find useful.
One personal project I did for practical reasons was to do a financial forecast. I never did strict budgets and balancing. For many years I was basically paycheck-to-paycheck, and I observed that some months seemed to have surplus and some shortage. So I wanted a tool to put in my bills with their due dates, and income with its frequency, and forecast out arbitrarily far to see what my income vs outgoing was. And ultimately use that information to set a realistic budget on non-essentials. And you can answer other questions like "What if I took a job making X ?" "What if I added a car payment?" "What if I put X into savings?". And from the generated forecast, you can see things like: February is worst month at -$500 total, but Nov is best month at +$600. Avg for a year is +$87.
By now, I'm sure this kind of app already exists. But the journey to make it myself had some interesting challenges. And it was very useful to me, not a toy.
Hi Kasey,
Thanks for the great response !
I think the things that's been stopping me is that I'm always trying to be as "efficient" as possible so I want to work on a project and develop skills from it which will be useful in a work environment. I think I just have to ease that back some and just get started.
If anyone else has some tips for educational resources or projects I'd be more than happy to hear them.