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What is your favorite project that you worked on when first learning to code?
I went to university for computer science up until the pandemic started. It was great. I remember working on so many projects that were basic but a lot of fun and others that were a lot more complex but still fun and rewarding. For example, one of the staples of beginner projects is Conway's Game of Life. I remember building that in HTML, CSS, and Java Script. One of my other favorite projects was a website for alum to visit to see alumni news and events, and also to lookup other alum.
What were your favorite projects when learning to code?
Snake/Conway/Sudoku are my 3 go to projects for trying to better understand/test/practice something.
Simple games that require input, calculation, and some form of interface, and can be further optimized with some sort of storage or pattern changes.
They're generic while having very specific goals. I hate when I can't find end to end example projects, just lots of "db goes here" or "UI goes here" stuff so having very clear and simple games to build end to end has helped me test other techniques and libraries in a way that I can easily assess where the advantages are.
I had a Turbo Pascal class in high school, and one of my first personal programs was helping my dad randomly generate a list of door prize winners for a convention he was helping to organize. The programming wasn't particularly interesting, but it stands out in my memory because the first time we ran it the program assigned the grand prize to my dad and we had to run it again to seem less suspicious.
More useful for anyone looking for project ideas, I've recently started working through Etudes for Programmers by Charles Wetherell. It's a little dated but the problems are the right difficulty where you can solve them but you have to work at it a bit. Things like Conway's life but also text formatting or graph coloring; things where you think "I could make a computer do that" but you don't fully know how to do it until you've actually sat down and written it. Project Euler is good for mathy programming problems, as is Advent of Code. Cryptopals is a fun way to learn cryptography by solving smallish problems. Exercism has you work through a series of simple programs as a way to learn new languages, and they're doing a "48 in 24" thing this year to encourage people to try solving problems in languages they might not otherwise pick.
For me, learning to code was creating mods for my GBBS Pro based BBS that I ran only at nights when my parents went to sleep (we only had the one phone line I could use). I would spend all day in classes during middle school writing down the code for my mods and then type them in when I came home from school, test everything out, and have the new mods ready when I opened the BBS up for the night. These mods were written in ACOS BASIC, which I believe is a language made specifically for GBBS.
I've been excited by many other programming projects over the years, but this was, by far, the best memory of programming I have. If I could get that feeling back....