How to Finish Projects

December 6th, 2024

Finishing coding projects can be difficult, especially when you run into a bug on a another to-do list app that you're making.

How do you increase the percentage of projects that you finish?

For me the answer was to take a bit more time and think about a problem that I could solve or a project that is based on one of my interests.

Automate My Shop (Ruby on Rails)

I've worked in the Shopify ecosystem for over 8 years and have grow to appreciate the power of Shopify Flow for it's ability to automate tedious work. I thought it would be fun to build a marketplace where merchants and partners can share and download Flows from the community.

This app has it all: a database, cloud storage, magic links for authentication and real time search.

I encountered a lot of issues trying to get all the pieces of the puzzle to fit, but never felt like giving up since I it's something I wanted to make.

Snake (Next.js and React)

I find building games is a great way to learn programming because you have a clear end goal. Nobody wants to play a half compelete game, right?

Games are great projects for beginners because you can build something extremely simple and expand on top of it.

Take Snake for example.

Snake (simple):

  • basic game functionality (snake eats apple)
  • keep track of score

Snake (with more features):

  • change difficultly
  • track high score in localStorage
  • confetti when new high score is reached
  • dark mode

Start off simple with just the core functionality then expand all you want!

Just Buy XEQT (Ruby and Bridgetown)

I wanted to try out Bridgetown (a site generator & framework for Ruby) by building a little blog.

I would consider myself somewhat into personal finance and was inspired by a subreddit r/justbuyxeqt, dedicated to one of the all in one index fund ETFS here in Canada.

The blog contains a few articles about XEQT including a compound interest calculator and gets a bit of traffic every day which is cool to see.

I even got a referral bonus from one of my links which was cool.

XEQT Traffic

If you stumped for project ideas ask yourself these questions:

  • Can I solve my own problem?
  • Can i build something for my job?
  • Is there an idea around my interests?

Happy building!