Quarantine Coding - 5 Programming Project Ideas

Key Takeaways

hello everybody and welcome back so I'm gonna start this video by wishing that all of you are safe and healthy and that you're doing okay during these tough times now I know that a lot is happening right now day by day things are changing and I'm sure that you guys are being affected by the corona virus and all of the things that are happening in the world right now what I want to encourage you to do in this video is to try to see some light in this situation and take advantage as much as possible of the spare time that you're gonna be given or that you're gonna have in the next weeks and months and that's why what I'm gonna do here is share with you my top five programming projects that you can work on while you're quarantined or while you're isolated now these projects gonna be a little bit different than some of the ones I've mentioned in previous videos because I'm going to assume that you're going to have a lot of time to work on these so I'm gonna suggest some bigger more impressive projects that are going to look great on a resume build your skills and allow you to learn new tools and technologies so we'll get into that in just a second just a quick word from our sponsor I need to thank simply learn for sponsoring this video and giving you all a discount on their data science master's course that's been co-developed with IBM this course is comprised of six full courses covering key technologies like our SAS Python tableau Hadoop and spark while working through this course you'll develop 15 real-life projects and master over 30 in-demand skills you will work with advanced analytics tools such as pandas use data collection tools like Apache HBase and learn ETL tools like hive Pig and scoop by purchasing this course you'll have lifetime access to all the course content and lectures receive 1200 USD worth IBM cloud credits and have access to the IBM cloud platforms like IBM Watson for 24/7 practice upon completion will receive certificates from IBM and simply learn to testify to your skills as an expert in data science click the link in the description to get started so the first type of project that I like to recommend to everyone is something that has to do with web development now this can be simple this can be complex but what I usually recommend for at least beginning is to pick some kind of application that you've already built and try to recreate that in a web-based version so maybe you have like a text-based sorting algorithm or maybe you have a text-based inventory system or maybe you even already built a graphical user interface but it's for a specific operating system or maybe it's even an iPhone app or something like that try to take that and convert that into a web-based application now this is gonna mean that you don't have to write nearly as much code as if you were doing this project from scratch and you already have something to kind of base your project off of so what this is going to allow you to do is kind of skip all the grunt work with getting all this back-end stuff functioning and just focus on learning how web development actually works and how you can serve these kind of applications on the web now obviously this is going to involve the use of HTML and CSS although I'm pretty sure from at least talking to a lot of different programmers most people have a basic knowledge of this and if you don't it's going to be pretty easy to pick that up so some frameworks that I like to recommend at least to get started with web development if you know anything about python is flask now flask is a really simple and great web framework for doing applications like I just described something that's a few different pages it's not crazy complex maybe you have a database but you don't need to and it's just really easy to get set up again it's a Python back-end web framework then from there all you need to do is pick what you want to use for the front-end so with flask it's way easier just to use custom HTML and CSS and your own JavaScript but if you don't want to style the web page yourself you can always use a framework like bootstrap now bootstrap is really easy to use CSS framework essentially it allows you to use some built-in classes it allows you to do some animations and you can make a really good looking website without having much knowledge of HTML and CSS and personally what I always do is I set up my Python back-end a flask back-end which is really easy to get set up and then I style the entire front end using bootstrap and bootstrap has a really great website that has a ton of different examples of all of the classes that they have in the different usages so it's really easy to create anything that you want so that's my project idea number one takes some application you've already created and turn it into a web based app obviously there's so many different ways to do this let me know if you have any other frameworks that you think are better for this but anyone who knows Python I always recommend flask you want something a bit more complex you can go with Django and these are great frameworks they're fairly easy to learn and one lets you learn them it's gonna allow you to do so many different things so my second project idea is to implement some popular algorithms now I know this is quite vague and I'm not giving you any real examples although I will later but this is a really great way to show people that not only do you know how to program can you create a project but you can also implement and you know a bit about algorithms and data structures and this looks really good on a resume where you have a project that's impressive on its own but also implements a popular algorithm that shows yes you understand how this algorithm works and you were good enough to actually go in and implement that yourself now this isn't really that difficult there's tons of explanations online on how these algorithms work and I guarantee you'll learn a ton as you actually go through and try to program it yourself so some examples of this or something like a path finding algorithm so maybe you make a web interface or maybe you make some kind of interface where a user can pick a start point and an end point and then the algorithm runs and it finds the shortest path between these two points that's a great example of something that I've personally done that I think looks really good on a resume another example of implementing a popular algorithm is something like stable matching now many people don't know what stable matching is but let's say we have a bunch of employers and we have a bunch of students the employers rank the students based on who they want to hire and the students rank the employer is based on who they want to work for well given that information how can we find the best possible match for all of the employers and for all the students so that each person gets their top choice you know within reason right gets the best possible choice that they can have this is a really interesting problem and that's called stable matching and that's another example of something that you can implement so pick kind of any real-world problem anything you want pick an algorithm that you want to try to implement and then try to tie it into a project and that's a great way to showcase your skills and to have a really nice resume project and something to talk about in potential interviews so my next project idea is aimed towards those of you that really like hardware and a little bit more hands-on what I'm gonna recommend for you guys is to do something where you interface with a microcontroller so obviously you know little microcontrollers like this you can program to do all kinds of crazy things so a project I've actually done with this is a live security system so what I actually did was hooked up a little USB camera to this device and this is a Nvidia Jetson nano by the way it's a little bit on the higher end when it comes to microcontrollers and I ran a facial detection and recognition script on this so when you walked near the camera it would pick up who you are and it would track and log which person was in which room at what time now with that kind of information you can do whatever you want you can create some kind of charge so you can create graphs you can make a website to show that information but what I mean to say here is that if you can interface with a little piece of hardware you can maybe have some kind of sensor on it you can do something interesting with it maybe even just pressing a button then you can have some really cool software in the background that takes all the information that you get from this microcontroller and does something really cool with it and again the examples I usually like to use or something like you know motion detection you could do the facial detection and recognition script and you don't need to buy something like this which is called the Jetson Nano it's actually a Nvidia product which has a GPU on it that's why it's got that heatsink in the fan there you get something like a Raspberry Pi you can get an Arduino there's all kinds of cheaper microcontrollers that are only like 15 or 20 bucks if you can afford that in times like this there are a lot of fun and you can do a lot of cool stuff with them and they actually have all these pins on the side which are called GPIO pins and what those allow you to do is actually control the voltage that goes to those pins from the microcontroller so say you want to set up you know a little circuit to it you want to create a little more more intricate kind of program or project I'm sure some of you know a lot more about electronics than I do then you can do that with a board like this and it really opens up the possibilities for the kind of projects you can create especially if you like to see how they're working and see them kind of running you know in the actual physical world as opposed to just on your computer screen a lot of people make robots with these things you know the possibilities are endless Google best Raspberry Pi projects or something like that and you'll find an entire list of amazing things to work on so my fourth project idea is to implement a machine learning and artificial intelligence model into some kind of project now I'll give you a few examples near the end of this section but just hear me out here so if you don't know much about machine learning obviously that's gonna be the first step is learning a bit about machine learning picking something that you think is interesting and then picking a project that you can apply that to now for any of you that are getting started and you want to figure out well how can I even get a machine learning model up and running I personally have a ton of different tutorials on how to do that but a great resource and a website to go to is actually the tensorflow website so tensorflow is a very popular machine learning and AI framework it's usually used with Python although they do have a JavaScript framework as well and I believe they might have one for Java and some other languages too but what it does on the website there is it has a ton of awesome guides and tutorials that walk you through almost an entire project that has to deal with machine so what this is gonna do for you to show you exactly how to get this model set up how to train the model how it works but I will warn you that is a little bit vague on some of the explanations so what I usually like to do is I go to the website I copy down all the code make sure that this thing is working and then I go back and I try to understand how each individual component is working and look up some things on the side watch some videos and figure out how this actually works some examples of some things that I've done in terms of integrating are implementing models into projects is something with the amnesty cheat data set what I actually did is I made a PI game interface in Python that allowed you to draw a digit with the mouse like 0 is 701 whatever you want to draw and then it would feed that pixel data to my machine learning model which I pretty much had just copied exactly from the tensorflow website then it would spit out and tell me what number it's thought that I drew and this was actually pretty accurate it worked pretty well it was my first experience actually implementing this into a project and the reason this is great is because it's some tangible thing that you can actually use to interface with your model it makes it a little bit more interesting than just having this text-based accuracy score that you see in so many different tutorials and guides and it's just a really great thing to be like yeah not only do I know how this works I can implement it and I can integrate it into some kind of project alright so the last project that I recommend to everyone and probably my personal favorite to work on is recreating an Atari game now the reason I say Atari is because these are typically easier kind of pixel based games that most people can figure out how to make and there's so many resources online at least for the texture packs for them for some of the graphics and just is really easy to make like you know a version of Tetris or snake or these simple kind of games that still do teach you a lot about programming and are always fun and interesting to recreate so that is my last project idea for you you know if you're working in Python you can use something like PI game maybe this is a good opportunity to explore something like unity so unity is actually where you can make 3d games and I know there's a ton of videos online and tutorials from Unity themselves on how to do that maybe you want to explore something like augmented reality I know you can do that in unity as well and it's just just a great opportunity to you know mess around make some fun games and play them and share them with your friends or family or whoever you may be isolated or quarantined with so those have been my five programming projects to work on while you're quarantined now again guys I know these times are tough I know a lot of you're upset I know a lot of things that are horrible are going around in the world yes that doesn't mean we can't take advantage of the spare time that we have I see far too often that people get very upset they get very sad they sit on the couch they want watch Netflix all day although that's reasonable and it makes sense to me I think that if we can take advantage and try to see the positives in these times we're only gonna come out better from them and that's what I encourage you all to do so anyways that has been this video if you guys enjoyed make sure you leave a like subscribe to the channel and as always leave some other video ideas that you'd like to see in the comments down below