At this point I had made around 20 projects. Some for fun, others for primarly learning a programming language or some cool feature within that language. Oftentimes, it was a culmination of both. Some took the span of hundreds of hours, while others amounted to a few dozen. 

Here are the five I enjoyed creating the most and why: 

5. Waste My Time

If we examine our lives we tend to find that it is not wildly different from day to day. We eat, sleep, work and maybe pursue some extra activities between those key moments. Are they enough? Do we waste our time or is it worthwhile? How does one even define what a waste or worth of time even is? That is up to ourselves to decide. To tally up the totals of our days and reflect on if what we are doing is enough or we could be doing more.

That is where the idea of my project Waste My Time came from. We select how much sleep we get, minus that from our 24 hours and with the remainder we decide if we are wasting, doing a chore or accomplishing something worthwhile. Afterwards we examine it and see where we can make some changes.

On a technical level I learned a lot at the time too. It was one of the first projects made learning Vue. I had learned about using both authorization and token authentication, an autocomplete ability which remembers users entries and working with dynamic CSS, to name just a few things.

4. Rebuilding WordPress Website from Scratch

In my humble programming beginnings I had started using WordPress for businesses to make websites. Over time I eventually stepped away from this content management system and learned to develop what we take for granted from scratch. Oh my, was that a headache. So much ease and simplicity when using an ecommerce shop on WordPress, say, than when having to learn to build one by yourself. Same with making a blog posting website. Pretty much anything, WordPress makes it simple. But over the course of time learning how to build that stuff by myself turned out to be deeply satisfying and rewarding. You can check out a video I made comparing WordPress and making a website completely by yourself here if you want to see a step-by-step about the pros and cons of each. 

While I would still suggest using WordPress for something like a blog posting website, learning the tools of creating it all by yourself is also a great way to go - especially when something goes wrong - since I remember as a novice WP creator even simple issues like moving a piece of content around used to be so frustrating to figure out! 

3. Next.js Covid19 Website

I enjoyed making this project for several reasons. First, it was my third teaching video series, all three teaching courses can be found here. I recorded myself teaching others how to make this exact website and uploaded to the education platform Udemy! Since this was the third teaching video I had made, I had been able to hone my abilities and improve aspects I had learned from the previous two. I also enjoyed this project because I had a lot of fun playing around with the API on Covid, but also because I could play around with the CSS a bit, and learn to work with both graphing and geolocation tools which worked with Next.js, the React language framework which I used in the video. I really enjoy using Next.js too!

2. YouTube Channel Wordfinder

An unusual idea that I have always wanted to build. Imagine looking for a word or sentence from a YouTube channel, over hundreds of videos and being able to find every time that person/channel has said the word or phrase and show it to you at that exact second. If you do not quite understand, I made a video showing how it works here!

Video compilations are nothing new on YouTube, and I always wondered how people do it. Either they thrawl through hundreds of hours of videos, or they create software to do it. So I did something similar, I made software that could do it. Imagine your favourite channel or person where you could see compilation videos of everytime they talk about a certain topic, for example. It works wonders and the possibilities are endless. I was suprised I made it and it felt extremely rewarding when I did. 

1. CoffeeMeNow

A website I am deeply proud of. What is it? CoffeeMeNow is a website that helps people who suffer from loneliness, isolation, social anxiety or simply trouble making new friends because of changing environment or other reasons. To check it out in video form and how exactly it works you can watch the video I made on it here. 

The idea is that you choose a location from hundreds of coffeeshops around your country, and someone else later agrees to meet you at that coffeeshop at a designated time that you have chosen. You meet up and talk about interests that you share based on your profiles. It is also anonymous so that there is no discrimination with regards to age, gender or disabilities. 

I have always wanted to make a website like this for many years, but never had the technical ability. I did not know what to do or where to start. But I learned different languages and frameworks under I was able to piece it all together and after a few hundred hours managed to finish this initial version, which I am very happy about.

Conclusion

There you have it guys, 5 different projects that I have worked on that I have enjoyed. That is not to say I did not enjoy all of the others, there are some that I loved that just missed the top 5. Special shoutouts to my previous two teaching projects: Animal Shelter Website and Pizza Website, along with Pokemon Ranked and English Teacher Site. If you enjoyed this article you can always contact me with any questions or topics you would like me to cover and I will see you again sometime! Peace!