Fun Coding Projects for Beginners
So I was chatting on bluesky with someone, and realized it'd be good to have a list of easy to get in to, fun coding projects. I want these to be accessible to people with little coding experience, and enjoyable to work on. I've also got an (under development) basic coding guide here.
Going to be treating this as a living document, and listing other sources of project ideas.
Cool Looking Thing
Just like, have the program print cool looking patterns to the terminal. You could even do like ascii animations. Or you could make a cowsay clone.
Simple Games
Recreating something like tic-tac-toe, or games with simple logic and graphics, can be a fun little project. With these simple graphics ones you can even do them purely with terminal input and output, If you really like setting up the logic of the game you could even do something more complex like chess.
Simulation
These can be quite complex, but can also be quite simple. The thing I'm thinking about is simulating many games of the Monte Hall with the two possible strategies so see how it goes. This is pretty easily doable with basic coding knowledge and a random number generator.
Static Website Generator
Okay, this one is a jump up in difficulty as you have to learn html and some basic ideas of parsing files, but it's pretty doable.
Basically you'd design a website in html, with templates for pages, then build a program to turn markdown files (or some other file format) into html that can go in the templates. Markdown is a simple language for putting headers and lists and such in a text file, and writing a program to convert it to html is a fairly easy task. Then you have the program dump that into your templates, write the results somewhere, and you've got a static html website you can put on neocities or something. I'm doing a similar thing with this website actually!
I want to note that setting up your own hosting for a website is much more work and usually costs some money, but neocities can do all of that for free.