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How To Come Up With Coding Project Ideas
In this video, I am sharing with you how I come up with unique coding project ideas. I have been feeling uninspired lately but also want to build more projects and share them with you. I took a step back and thought about ways I could get inspired again and here are some of the top ways that have really helped me!
Tiffany is a software developer who started her career in the modeling & fashion industry. Tech can be very overwhelming for many at first as she experienced firsthand entering into the industry.
I've been trying to come up with some side projects that I can work on and show you. However, the question that remains is this: Where do you usually acquire ideas and inspiration for the kinds of things you'd like to make?
For this, I'll divide it into categories that I've lately researched to discover inspiration for building projects that I'm passionate about.
Hobbies
It should come as no surprise that the first is gaining inspiration from your hobbies. Get a hobby if you don't already have one. You cannot have your entire life revolve around technology or your profession.
Hobbies are quite important, and they don't have to be this bizarre activity. It could be a hobby in which you have a strong interest, such as collecting cards. Basically, everything that you are interested in. You can turn any area of interest into a project; it doesn't have to be a specific hobby.
It is true that we can become stuck generating fresh ideas on occasion. RapidAPI is one item that helped me break free of this rut. There are so many amazing APIs listed there that I can't help but be fascinated by them.
I've recently begun to structure projects around these APIs. For instance, I created an API using an Concert-Artists-Event-Tracker API from RapidAPI Hub.
So I began going backward in terms of identifying things I'm interested in with my hobbies and interests, locating APIs that connect to it, reading about the APIs via the documentation, observing what others have built, and gaining a great deal of inspiration to create small projects.
Playing makes belief
Playing makes belief is the subsequent source of creative inspiration or ideas for my current endeavors. This is something I did early on when building my initial developer portfolio. Playing makes belief means creating projects for individuals who didn't ask for them and probably didn't need them.
Once, I constructed a project for my father's construction company. I created a website with a logo and added houses and information to it. But the idea is that even if someone in your family or circle of friends doesn't require a website, app, or whatever it is that you specialize in, you can still make something for them, and you don't even have to consult with them or discuss it.
For instance, you can create a website for your mother that features all of her baked goods and contact information, and begin to view her as a client. It will accomplish two goals, particularly if you are just beginning your development career. It clearly demonstrates your initiative. It appears that you are accepting clients. No one knows it's your mother or who the person is for whom you created the website, therefore this is also a superb method.
Games
Games are the third thing that has been a major source of inspiration for me. I've been toying with Python a lot, and it's a great language for creating quick and enjoyable projects.
I've been enjoying discovering new games, especially retro games, to build with it. So here is yet another idea. You can make an X's and O's game, a chess game, or a hangman game, and you just make a game regardless of whether you played it or not. That's not the point, but pick a favorite game of yours and build it.
Steal like an artist
Another intriguing technique to create projects is to steal like an artist, which means it's perfectly acceptable to borrow inspiration from people who have developed outstanding projects. Obviously, you shouldn't copy them exactly, but why not draw inspiration from them if you witness someone creating something truly remarkable?
This definitely makes you question why you shouldn't design your own project differently. This is not a copy of someone else's work. This does not imply that your project is identical to theirs; rather, it seeks inspiration from others.
This occurs frequently in music, fashion, culinary, and every other business. Therefore, it is also prevalent in the IT industry, and if you have a person you greatly admire, analyze their projects and see if you can draw inspiration from them.
Solving Real-World Problems
Real-world problem-solving has been a large part of my recent activity. This is my current favorite pastime. Because it is so enjoyable, I rapidly develop a strong passion for it.
Previously, I created a React app that took an API for food and randomized the results. Therefore, each time I pressed a button, a different type of food output would be generated. This would advise me what kind of takeout I should buy for dinner. Given the difficulty of ordering meals, it is impossible to decide what to eat and buy food. So I was like, let the code do it for me.
It just goes to show how much fun it can be to develop solutions for actual problems. Whether it's something that places food orders for you, chooses your clothes for you, offers you a variety of recipes to cook with various drinks to make—the list is endless—it's a really great way to become deeply invested in a project because you know you'll use it in the future. It is a solution to an issue that exists in the real world.
