How I come up with project ideas (and never faced tutorial hell)

I often read the term "tutorial hell " and I always wonder why so many people get stuck while I have so many ideas in my head for my own projects. Let me explain why I've never ended up in tutorial hell and how I come up with so many different ideas.

Tutorials

Of course, I watched a lot of tutorials during my learning journey, and I still do to gain more knowledge about certain things and improve my skills on a daily basis.

But even as I'm watching and following along with the tutorial, I'm already taking in the good things I could use from that tutorial in my head and thinking about how I could use them in one of my own projects.

A good example is the To Do List tutorial, which everyone seems to have enough of already. And actually, I don't quite understand. If you watch a really good tutorial on how to create a to-do list, you learn one of the most important programming skills you need to understand to get a job in tech: CRUD.

And since everyone knows how a to-do list works, this is the best way to learn and understand CRUD functionality.

In case you don't know what CRUD is:

• Create (a task)
• Read (view/read the task)
• Update (the task)
• Delete (delete the task)

This logic appears in so many applications that I was happy to learn about it while creating a to-do list and later use it in my own projects (like Nikki - the online diary).

Project ideas

I'm sure everyone has a hobby or interest in certain things. My interests are Japanese language and culture and music. I studied musicology and Japanese studies, with a focus on movies/video games and their music.

I therefore draw all my ideas from these hobbies, and there are many. Here are some examples:

1. a name converter from latin letters to kanji
2. a memory game with kanji
3. a zodiac calculator
4. logo creation of a fictional company I saw in an anime
5. a Pokédex with the PokeApi for the 25th anniversary of Pokémon
6. a tribute page with various features of my favorite directors
7. an online diary where users can pin their thoughts, using internationalization
8. and many more

As a React Developer I was able to use many different features and logics in my projects and therefore discuss them in interviews, from useState/useEffect to ContextAPI, CRUD (localStorage and Google Firebase), internationalization, SEO, PWA, various API (data fetching), UI design, a11y, thumbnail creation, and many more.

Conclusion

As you can see, all these projects are an inspiration and a result of my hobbies. They have many different functions and represent my personality. They make my projects look unique to recruiters and that's what everyone out there says:

Stop cloning Netflix or Instagram (except for learning purposes) and start creating your own projects that show your personality and make you stand out, make you memorable.

So think about what you are interested in, what your personality looks like and start creating projects that you love to talk about because they are unique and created by you.

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Thanks for your reading and time. I really appreciate it!

Comments

[Ricardo Magalhães]

ジュリアさんは日本語を勉強しているんですか？すごいですな！私も勉強していますo(￣▽￣)ブ ともかく。。。

I really like the ideas you gave! Specially the pokedex and the japanese related one :P I think I'll try making something about japanese verb conjugation to practice – both web development as well as japanese haha :D

Thanks for sharing your experience :)

[tanth1993]

nice article. after working as Front-End for a year, I built my first pet project, I apply CRUD using Firebase. The ideas in this project come from what I have learned in my job (business,logic) not in tutorial.
I realize that Tutorials in the internet just teach us the theory not the idea.

[Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE]

Exactly :)

[Alaz Tetik]

Good example projects from your hobbies, inspirational.

[Faith Morante]

Thats creativity right there!

[Ivy Chen]

love it!

[Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE]

thank you Ivy :)