I learn best by doing, and learning coding via projects and making products is probably the best way to learn coding, for me. YMMV of course.

Here’s some project ideas I came up with:

Public Design Jobs 2.0, with automated web scraper and posting. Public Design Jobs shows design and innovation jobs in governments worldwide. I built this job board in Wordpress and launched v1.0 last year. It was pretty well-received but I stopped development for it as the manual scraping and posting was too much work. I’d been looking for a suitable Wordpress scraper bot plugin but none worked as I wanted. So this year, I want to revamp it and code it from ground up, myself. 

Can’t Wait - a travel countdown profile page. I’m a big fan of countdownto.xyz  and had been using it to countdown to my trips for the year. There’s something really inspiring about having a countdown timer against a huge, beautiful image of your travel destination. I did that last year and realised having something to look forward to make a big difference to the quality of my mental well-being. But the site could only track single events. I would love to have a profile page to track various trips throughout the year, and have a countdown for each, and be able to look back at the end of the year with some nice images. 

Lifelist - a mashup of WIP/Makerlog, Year Progress but for lifegoals. I enjoy living a more intentional life. So far many of my 200wad posts had been from year-end reflections during a month of personal solo retreat in Bali. I’d love to have a task log for setting goals at beginning of year, tracking progress and showing some stats/streaks. This makes it much easier to do my reviews at the end of year. Not just numbers, but also providing inspiring, prompting questions throughout and reminders to reflect.   

Nagnag, a task reminder Telegram bot - I enjoyed using the Nagger iOS app. It’s basically a task reminder app which sends you a notification every X number of minutes for Y number of times. But unfortunately the developer had stopped development for it for iOS 12 onwards. I want to make something similar but don’t want to have to pay to maintain a developer account on the App Store, so I’m thinking of Telegram instead. Plus it’s just so much more fun creating bots on Telegram and learning about conversational UI. There’s various task reminder bots available on Telegram but none quite like Nagger, so this is my attempt at re-creating something I want.

NomadFamily - Nomadlist but for families. This project is probably just me preparing for the probable future with kids. A list site with the resources for family-friendly cities, with the right healthcare, family care, education and social arrangements for children. 

#1mvp1month 2.0 - automating some of the products that I made last year on #1mvp1month, and relaunching them. 

Needless to say, I don’t know any coding at this point and have no idea how I can even make them! So what do you think I’ll need in terms of frameworks, languages, tools and resources? Anything I need to look out for, mistakes to avoid, good practices to adopt?

? Day 29 of the #200wad challenge.