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A standard piece of advice for beginner programmers is that you learn most effectively when working on your personal projects. It’s good advice, but you can find yourself struggling to follow it-especially if you are very new to the IT craft. This article acts as a step-by-step guide that you can follow to start on your projects and learn along the way. My examples are with the frontend web development stack-HTML + CSS + JS,-but you can adapt this approach to any technology you’re using.
Pick a simple use case
The first step: don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. It’s common for people to attempt to build things like clones of popular websites, but doing this results in more features than one can realistically develop. If you insist on taking inspiration from existing products, try simplifying it to an extreme:
- if you build a Reddit clone, build a hard-coded link list (for example, best programming websites) where people can up or downvote, OR a link list where you just add links to a long list
- if you build an Airbnb clone, make just a static property listing-no booking and no adding new properties
- if you build an Uber clone, create an order summary page-a ride from point A to point B
