5 Ideas for Web Developer Portfolio Projects that Standout

#webdev #beginners #career #javascript

Calculators, Todo lists, weather apps

They've all been done to death as portfolio projects

Not only are they boring to make, they aren't going to help you stand out when it comes to getting a job. Even if you don't directly make any of these projects, I hope they'll give you some inspiration to create something interesting.

Be sure to subscribe if you want to see more project ideas and tutorials

Real Time Stock Market Chart or Game

Using the Pusher API makes it easy to PUSH real time data to all users of your application. Some examples of how you could use this for projects would be something like a real time dashboard with stock market data or an online video game that requires shared data, like a chess board.

Congress Net Worth Tracker

Use the Open Secrets database or API to get all kinds of data on the members of the US congress.

One example of what you could do is create a data visualization app that shows the assets and net worth of each member of congress and allow comparisons by party or number of years in congress

Automated Invites/Letters for Events

Tired of forgetting to send birthday cards for family and friends? Hosting an event and want to send customized invitations without all the work? Using the Lob API you can use code to automate this process with a few lines of code!

You could create a spreadsheet containing names, addresses, and other data. Then use an image library to make custom images for postcards with the person's name on it. You could also pre-schedule the date you want each letter or postcard sent using a small database

Reddit User Analyzer

Want an easy way to access almost every piece of data on Reddit? The Pushshift API makes this very easy and is free to use.

My idea for this is to create a frontend app that queries the API and displays data for the username input. You could use charts and graphs to display the data like most upvoted comments, most frequently posted subreddits, most common words used, and much more.

Online Reputation Management Tool

Every company is worried about what people are saying about them online, the problem is that it's impossible to manually monitor this. But by using WebHose you can automate this process by checking for mentions of keywords using different filters such as date, site URL, and more

For this project you can create a simple User Interface to allow non-technical users to input keywords that will then be periodically checked and alerts sent to the users.

Conclusion

I'll be putting out more project ideas and tutorials soon so be sure to follow or subscribe to my YT channel if you are interested. If you make anything inspired by this post feel free to leave a comment to the github repo so others can check it out!

Top comments (25)

femolacaster • Feb 27 '21

I think it's important you do projects on subjects you are passionate about. That would keep you going when inspiration is at its lowest. And most importany, KISS - keep it simple. You don't need to build a very large and complex project.

Lars Ejaas • Jul 8 '21 • Edited

Yeah, second this! Working on something you are passionate about or find interesting makes it way more fun!
I recently wanted to learn TypeScript, which was a bit heavy for me to get started on. But I then made this small contribution to Bruce Willis at bruce-willis.rocks/en/ that made it way more fun! There is a lot of free API's you can leverage for some fun projects 😁