One of the most difficult parts of personal projects is determining what you’d like to do. If you’re stuck and don’t have any ideas, consider the things that you’re passionate about. With this strategy, the possibilities are endless.

Examples

• If you spent time playing the violin as a child, you could make a program that converts an audio recording of music into sheet music (this may seem super complex, but there are libraries that will help with a lot of the tough tasks)
• If you live near the ocean and want to inform people about the harms of ocean trash, make an informational website and include a link to donate to a conservation organization
• If you enjoy playing poker with friends, you could code a Python app that lets any number of users play poker
• If you’re a big Game of Thrones fan, you could build a program that outputs new lines of dialogue in the style of each character.

Personal Website

If that route doesn’t spur any ideas, one project that everyone can take on is building a personal website. Many engineers have a site that showcases their resume, bio, and personality. Here’s a random example that we found: https://www.taniarascia.com/, and if you Google “SWE personal website,” tons more will pop up. This project can be a great chance to learn web development, and Github Pages will allow you to host a free site on a github.io domain (guide here). If you’d like your site to be on a custom domain, you can look into AWS Route 53 and AWS Amplify as easy ways to secure your custom domain (pretty cheaply) while also giving you the chance to learn the basics of Cloud Services.

Other Ways to Discover Projects

If you’d still like to go in a different direction, there are many resources online that have ideas for personal projects. Here are a bunch to get you started:

• Big list of ideas here‍
• Relatively-simple projects with guides/walkthroughs here‍
• Reddit thread with advice from recruiters here‍
• Reddit thread with more idea: here‍
• Simple project ideas categorized by programming level here‍
• Higher-level list of ideas here‍
• Game clones here‍
• Contributing to Open Source projects here‍
• 5 Guided AI/ML Python Projects You Can Complete in Under An Hour here