9 Creative Project Ideas for Junior Web Developers

When people ask me what the secret is to becoming a good web developer, my answer is:

There is no secret. You have to read (a lot) and practice (a lot).

Nothing beats experimenting with new technologies (or reinforcing the ones you already master) by building numerous projects. The advantage of small projects is having a well-filled portfolio to show a future employer, even without professional experience.

But very often junior developers, despite their motivation, have no idea what project to code or simply don't want to copy a concept already done a thousand times by other developers.

That's why I created this list of short projects, whose concept is known to everyone but in which each developer will be able to breathe their own soul and creativity into it, which is much more interesting!

For information, the difficulty indicated relates to the junior developer level; even the highest difficulty remains accessible to beginners but will take more time to complete.

1 - A random name generator

Skills: Front-end
Focus: Interface, form, handling randomness
Difficulty: 1/5

The advantage of a project like this one is that the interface can be very simple and works for a whole range of subjects.

Are you a fan of role-playing games? Generate character names! But this also works for startup names, cat and dog names, etc... There will be something for everyone!

2 - A portfolio

Skills: Front-end
Focus: Design and information hierarchy
Difficulty: 1/5

If you think that developing a portfolio can't be fun, it's because you haven't thought about it enough yet and you need to try to break free from preconceived ideas that confine your mind!

Your portfolio must both allow someone to find your information the way they want, while also being truly original to capture their attention!

Here's an example of a command-line terminal portfolio/resume I developed a few years ago: https://nicolas.brondin-bernard.com/cv/

3 - A Quiz

Skills: Front-end and Back-end
Focus: Data workflow
Difficulty: 2/5

Creating a quiz on a subject you know well is both a good way to learn how to master a simple data workflow, to make sure your players can't cheat, but also to popularize and convey information on a subject you love.

4 - An original converter

Skills: Front-end
Focus: Data manipulation
Difficulty: 2/5

The idea here is not to convert euros into dollars, but rather to convert data from an uncommon measurement system to another. For example: What is the height of the Eiffel Tower in number of hamburgers? What is the weight of the planet Mars in number of printers?

Of course, if the converter is well made, it should also allow converting real units and have equally consistent results!

5 - A desktop interface

Skills: Front-end
Focus: Managing interactions in javascript
Difficulty: 3/5

What would you say to developing your own graphical operating system in Javascript? Of course, this doesn't mean developing the complex underlying software part of an operating system, but limiting yourself to window management, opening files, icons, etc...

Enhancements:

• You could even turn this project into an investigation game in which the player must search for information hidden within the system!

6 - A perfect sign-up

Skills: Front-end, Back-end
Focus: User experience, form handling, gamification, authentication
Difficulty: 3/5

Your goal: create a multi-page sign-up and login form so well thought out and so surprising that the user should want to sign up even if they don't know the service behind it.

Managing to capture the user's attention, making sure that they feel no disappointment at ANY point to get them to take a leap of faith is a very educational exercise in terms of UX.

Enhancements:

• Add a tracking system to find out at which point most users drop off, in order to fix it.

7 - A text-based role-playing game

Skills: Back-end
Focus: Video game, command parsing
Difficulty: 4/5

Do you know the game Zork? It's an adventure game released in the 70s whose goal was to complete a quest by interacting with the game through simple text commands like:

"Open the chest; Pick sword; Go North;"

The idea of such a game is brilliant because it sparks the imagination, there's no need for graphical resources to develop it, but it does allow you to get started with programming game engines.

For those who would like to try the original game, it's available online: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/play/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_vq

8 - An open-source data visualization page

Skills: Front-end and back-end
Focus: Maps, charts and visualization
Difficulty: 4/5

What's interesting about good visualization is that you can convey a message, inspire people, or make them aware of something serious just by working with precise and verifiable sources.

There is even a French website that gathers hundreds of open-data sets right here: https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/

One of the most well-known examples in recent weeks is the real-time Covid-19 case tracking website: https://ncov2019.live/data

9 - An automatic site crawler

Skills: Back-end
Focus: HTTP, proxies, user-agents, cron...
Difficulty: 5/5

Managing to retrieve information from a site that doesn't have an open API is like playing cat and mouse, because while your goal is to gather the data you're interested in at the time you want, the task of the site in question is often to prevent you from doing so.

However, be careful to stay within the legal framework for consulting data provided by the targeted site!