How to find project ideas to practice web development(Not A Todo App)

Ever wondered how to get a real world experience on web development while we are in a learning phase. this aricle share some of the useful way to find a project ideas for your portofolio or even a startup business as an indie maker.

you might be wondering, what is the problem with building a TO-DO Application while learning?. you are right. there is no problem in building a Todo Application or a simple chat application.

The reason why most of the App idea articles or even some repository ask you to build this kind of application is to get you familiarize with how things work on the particular programming language or framework.

Actually that is a good thing, but don’t get stuck at that phase. it is not the end of application development. because, i have been in that phase and it is just not enough when you start to grow in your career.

Things are changing frequently in web development. just knowing how CRUD works on a X or Y programming language or a framework is not just enough in this competitive world anymore.

you can ask me, then what is important? are you saying practicing is not useful anymore. NO, practice is one of the best thing to do. it helps you to become an expert on the specific domain.

All i am saying is, how we can do that efficiently is more important than just following project idea from a template blog or repository out there.

Here’s what i am following to get new ideas for my portofolio projects or even for passive side projects.

Method

It is very simple one. First and foremost, go to any freelancing websites out there such as UpWork or any other freelancing site.

Select your Category, Here we will select as Web development.

Try to read each Project description and what they want from a freelancer. That is super important. i can’t force it enough. do that with curiosity. For example,

consider the above example, it describes that they want to build a video feed application for a financial sector. it seems like an interesting and fun thing to do. you can even apply your own flavor on top of it. Let’s say a video feed application for sports domain.

Once you read enough of the project descriptions. you might sense to get what people are expecting and you can categorize the business requirement. how people want to use technology to solve a real world problem.

If you ask me, that is the most valuable skill than just practicing a X or Y framework because, it doesn’t matter in business world. All it matters is what you do with that. So, understand that. that skill will take you long way.

Well, that is an efficient method to find a project ideas for your side project or learning web development.

Wait, there’s an another trick that i want to show you to find project ideas.

When you click the Project description in Upwork. you can see the client work history. try to find what kind of project they have done. you might end up finding an interesting idea from there.

Do the same thing for freelancer’s profile. click on the freelancer’s profile and see what kind of project he has done in the past. you might end up finding an another interesting project ideas from there.

OK. enough about just saying about the method. Let me show you how i find few project ideas using the above method.

Project Ideas

Like i said above, i followed that method and found a freelancer’s profile. he worked on quite a lot of projects in React,Nodejs(My Expertise). i went through his profile and found few interesting ideas from there. let me share the ideas with you.

Note: Idea can be implemented in any tech stack. All it matters is, what kind of problem it solves.

Album Sharing Platform

Consider that you are a photographer, you took different variety of pictures such are wildlife photos, wedding photos and food lifestyle photos. you want to share different kind of photos to different clients.

Let’s say you want to share your wedding album samples to one client and wildlife photography to another client to get more project works. Let’s see how to build a web application around that.

Problem statement

Build a Saas Application where photographers are end customers. they can Upload all their photos to their dashboard and categories them based on their need. platform also allows them to create Album site design based on the category.

Reference: Consider this application as reference

Stick Notes App

I know this might sound familiar. but trust me, by building this application.you will get a good experience on what kind of problem a stick note app solves.

I assume that you know about the concepts of scrums and agile sprints. Every week, team will set a goal and work towards it. To note down every details of the goal, a popular way is to use stick notes on board. But since, we are moving towards the remote culture. it is a good idea to move that to a digital world.

Problem Statement

Build an Application where user can create boards and invite other users. Inside a board, user can create notes on any place and move it around. Other users can collaborate within the board.

Note: it should be real time.

Reference : https://stickies.io/

Conclusion

Always, remember. we are helping to solve a business problem using a technology. technology can change but problem solving won’t. use technology as a tool to solve the problem. Don’t follow the race of X vs Y language or Will X be dead because of Y. please don’t do that. Learn to solve the problem and stand out from the crowd. Happy Coding :-)