As a student, I don't have a ton of time for personal projects, but I've worked on a few very small pieces. I'm about halfway through a text-based adventure game myself, and it will probably be my first real project.
I'm curious as to what your first project was, and were you proud of it? Are you still proud of it?
Top comments (3)
The first project I was proud about is my little dependency checker in Python, Novigrad (sources on my Github)
I never used Python more than for maths in school and my coworker was a very strict and skilled developer (DevOps, Assembly dev, IoT, etc.). He asked me a dependency checker and I was completely panicked about the idea of having a project that I can not code and deploy.
But I was dead motivated ! So I learned Python all by myself, by reading, coding, failing and asking questions. After two days I finally finished it (and improved it after).
With this project, he congratulates me and could see my limits, then he helped me to push them. Finally the "impostor syndrome" that everyone mention started to fade.
I think it was not about the project but more about the lessons and experiences it gave me after it. I was proud to see that I am able to learn and succeed by myself, proud to see a developer consider me as a developer too, proud to have my name on a functional and useful project, even if nobody use it, it's my first "dev victory"!
Just took a look at the source code! Nice work :)
I'd have to go with my first project that I wrote professionally that went beyond just enhancing someone else's code. The application, written in MASM and C, involved obtaining data from scales and other measuring devices and transferring it, via modem, to a central database. This was back in the pre-Internet era (1990), so the transfer was done over often unreliable 2400 to 9600 bps modem connections. The module sold for a whopping $9000 a pop (about 1/2 my annual salary at the time) plus annual maintenance.
The funny thing is that there's still demand for this kind of project, the only difference is that today it's going over the Internet to 'the cloud' and things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are a lot more sophisticated than a simple serial interface.