12 Months 12 Projects

Hi if you havent already I suggest you first read the welcome post so you can understand what kind of amateur hour production you have tuned into.

Ok now that you know the level of unseriousness that this blog incorporates feel free to carry on to the main portion of this post.

I am a hobbyist developer. It is a label I have applied to myself and I define it as someone who is not employed to develop, but does it anyways. You may not agree with this definition and thats ok (read I dont care) but I call myself because I do not have a job in tech although I want to. There are many reasons why I dont have a job there some are very obvious, some are personal but I am trying to rectify thus 12 months 12 projects

My Goal is to try reaaaaallly reaaally hard and each month dedicate my coding to a particular project. I expect a lot of things to go wrong, a lot of things to get in the way for example adhd, my full-time job, a new game that is coming out. But I am hoping with a hard fixed deadline I will be forced to dedicate a substantial portion of my free time to making something and most importantly releasing something each month.

Now don't get me wrong I do not have totally high hopes of making it through the whole year This Time. But I believe this will be the first time of many times I try this and each time will be better than the last incremental progress is still progress.

But why am I doing this I hear no one asking, well let me tell you. This goes back to the label I gave myself, the hobbyist developer. I really want to change it, I want to just be a developer someone whose job is to develop using code. It can be for a company it can be for myself or open source but the point is I want to upgrade. The things that are hindering this are the personal things. I am not confident in myself, I have learnt by myself and in bootcamps many things in relation to coding and I can make and do stuff with code. But that doesn't stop me from feeling I am missing something from what I have learnt. Whether it is developer thinking or the process of building a product I don't feel as though I am ready. Now I know all junior developers will feel that way I understand imposter syndrome but still with out working day in and out I feel it will be hard for me to improve enough (guess what extremes I had to take to learn a second language). Also I no longer have any projects to show off. With Heroku no longer having a free tier my old projects that I had are no longer visible so this way I am able to kill two birds with one idea. By try to complete 12 Projects in 12 months and release what ever I have done I hope to learn new things with each project and have something to show for it.

Now on to the final part of this longwinded post what are the projects going to be. To be honest I haven't thought them all through I am still in the planning stage for what I want to make I have some ideas for some of the 12 and what I plan to learn from making them so in no particular order here they are

Classroom Flashcard game app

This project would deal with user log in and user collections. it would be for teachers in an esl setting as that is a field I have worked in and felt the need for.

Todo app

This is everyones beginner project which I have not actually done. From this I plan to work with mobile log in (QR codes and wechat). If it was a just a pure todo app because of the plethora of video tutorials of people making this I think i wouldnt be challenging or have much learning experience from it. So I would like to improve my wechat developing skills and working with apis

Jobs board

This I will work on webscraping and tweaking to get the information and also cron-jobs

Language learning app

I have an idea for a language learning app where you don't focus on the vocabulary at first but focus on sentence structure with vocabulary coming in tertiary. I have no idea if it will work but I am willing to try it out.

Word game

With this I plan to work on multiplayer interaction and user inputs

Ecommerce site

This is probably the hardest on the list because it deals with so much different aspects from user login to money

Homework upload portal

This will deal with student login and file uploads, and email notifications

So there you have it these are some of the ideas I already have for some of the projects I want make. I am still in the planning phase right now but will start building from next month and hopefully blog posting to keep a record of my progress. As you can see I am still short of 12 ideas for projects so if you have any let me know.