After taking a course to learn a brand new programming language or a development stack, you are able to learn and understand all the fundamentals and concepts of it. But after that what do you do?

So that is what I would want to discuss in this blog post. Hope this will be helpful for people reading this post.

✍ Write down the topics that you understood the best

This is the first step to start building projects. When you have written the topics that you understand most, you will clearly know what projects you will be able to build and finish.

Because, at the start you don't want to get into complex projects and find them difficult and stop in the middle of it. As a result, you might lose the incentive to do more projects.

So, it would be better to do more of what you know first and then do more on what you find difficult.

👀 Look at projects that other developers have built

Initially, you are less likely to have ideas on what projects to work on as the programming language or the development stack may be new to you. So it would be best to take a look at what others have built.

You can do this by searching on Google for projects of what you have learnt. This is very helpful as these websites usually show the projects that they have made together with the UI, the code and sometimes their development process such as the errors they encountered and much more.

In a nutshell, by getting an idea of what others have built, it will give you a brief context of the possible projects that you can work on to improve your knowledge on what you have learnt.

💭 Develop an idea of the project that you are going to work on

It is good to have a wireframe of the project and writing down the flow of the website and then designing the project and the finally starting to code it. But this is a more time consuming task that at the end has a minimal effect on the overall project. As these are projects that you want to build with an intention to improve your skills in coding, it would be less necessary to focus on other parts of the process for now.

You could do this by having a basic understanding of how the project will look like, maybe you could draw out on how the project would look like if you think the UI is important and has more functionalities.

Then simply, write down the key features that you want the project to include. Key features means the topic of a set of features that you want to include. For example, if you want to have many different styles of buttons, then you could simply have it under a topic feature of e.g. Style the buttons.

This is simply going to make the process of making the project more easier.

👩‍💻 Start Developing!

Until now, the steps that you have taken is just the start. Now you can start coding! Build the project by building the features one by one and then you will be able to tackle the errors easily and overall know what you are doing.

When you are developing the project, don't hesitate to google your errors and find solutions from developers who have already encountered the error. It is also good to try your best to tackle the error yourself, but this is ideal if you are not working on it for an important reason such as for your developer interview, whereas in this case, your aim may be most likely to learn as much as possible and build the project as fast as possible.

After you have finished developing, try to host it on the internet. You can use Netlify or GitHub Pages to host your website for free. This will help others to take a look at your projects rather than having it in your computer. You could also link the hosted project on your portfolio so that the recruiters can view your project.

Also, once the project is fully built, you can share it with your developer friends to get some feedback on it, however this is optional, you could just make the projects just to display it on your portfolio.

Ok, so that is it. 🙌

This is the ideal route that you might have to take after taking on a development course to improve your understanding and also built some good projects.

I would like to thank anyone who took the time to read this blog post and I hope that this blog would have been helpful to you. Whether you are here after finishing a Udemy course looking for what to do, maybe this helped you and many developers as well.

🙋‍♂️ If you have any questions or feedback, leave them in the comments and I will get back with you in some time.

See you next time!

Shanjai raj Developer & YouTuber