Project Ideas for Beginner Software Developers
In this post, I am listing five project ideas for people beginning their journey in software development, which I too wish to build myself sometime in the future. There are a lot of ideas up on the internet but below are the specific ones from which you can get full-stack learning and valuable experience developing.
1. Software Project Sharing Platform
The idea is a platform for developers to showcase their projects by providing details, presentations, videos, and links to their git repositories. It is similar to a social media app but the content would be based on technical projects. Users can view others’ projects, follow developers, and provide feedback. The purpose is to share project ideas, showcase skills, and maintain a developer profile. It involves creating dynamic web pages, building APIs, and working with databases.
Potential features:
- Feed of projects
- Add images and video presentations of the project
- Developer profile
- Search and follow developers
- Like and comment on projects
2. Music Streaming App
A web or mobile app for music streaming like Spotify. Developing such an application involves working with files, audio players, notifications, databases, storage, and much more. You will have numerous learnings while developing the project since it pushes you to think and design before implementing a requirement such as efficiently searching songs, ways of storing audio files, pushing meaningful notifications, getting all songs of an album, fetching songs based on artist, etc.; thereby helps in improving your problem-solving capability.
Where will you store audio files? How will you stream music?
Potential features:
- Search and listen to music
- Pause, play, rewind, fast-forward, share, and download music
- Push notifications
- Display albums, artists, song lyrics
3. QR Code Generator and Reader
QR (Quick Response) codes are everywhere nowadays, we can see them used for encoding web page links, tracking products, making payments, and whatnot. The purpose of the application, either a web or mobile app is to be able to generate QR codes for a given URL and also scan them. The app must allow the creation of static (which cannot be changed after creation) and dynamic codes (short URLs that can be edited after creation).
How will you build and integrate a QR reader/scanner?
Potential features:
- Scan the QR code
- Generate static and dynamic QR codes
4. Chat Application
Chat apps are one of the most common projects which everybody builds. This is on my project list because of its technological scope. You get to learn about web sockets, managing chat sessions, and writing logic as a whole. Also, think of different features such as chat rooms, connecting with random people, the ability to send images and videos in chat, and end-to-end encryption of messages. Additionally, connect the app to the database for persisting the user chats.
Which database is ideal, Relational or Non-relational?
Potential features:
- Chat with specific persons
- Creating groups for multi-person chatting
- Sharing images and videos
- Reacting (emojis) on chat messages
- Encryption of chat messages
5. Password Manager App
I have many passwords and pins of various accounts, it’s tough for me to remember all of them, thanks to the strong password rules like a minimum length of 8/12 characters with capitals, numbers, and symbols. I explored different password manager apps that could ease my job but most of them are either paid or aren’t providing me the simplicity of storing passwords. That’s how I got this idea to build an app that is simple, accessible, versatile to different types of passwords, and secure (obviously). The idea is to build an app that stores, retrieves, and manages our passwords and pins securely. You will learn about encryption and get to work on databases.
What’s the most secure encryption algorithm?
Potential features:
- Store account passwords and pins
- Access all the passwords stored in the app using a single master PIN
- Two-factor authentication for accessing passwords
TL;DR
Here’s the list of five project ideas:
- Software project sharing platform
- Music streaming app
- QR code generator and reader
- Chat application
- Password manager app
