First project ideas?

[Chaosboye]

Hey. I just finished a tutorial for my first programming language (Python), and I'm looking for some fun or interesting ways to utilize my new skills (and to gain more, as I am obviously not a very good coder at this point in time). These do not have to be practical projects. I'm just looking for anything to do to give myself some more experience.

[Xanthir]

ProjectEuler.com is a fun way to exercise some new programming chops. You'll learn a lot about how to use the right datastructures for the job!

(Harder problems also typically require some down-and-dirty programming that doesn't help you in your everyday programming life, but it's good to develop those skills anyway for when you do need them.)

[Chaosboye]

I looked into it. Seems like a good way to get started. And it's not likely that I'll run out of things to do.

[Sagekilla]

Try implementing Conway's Game of Life. It's great fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

[Maelstrom.]

Try implementing Conway's Game of Life. It's great fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

I second Conway's Game of Life. I try to implement it in every new language I learn, as it is a fun and interesting (but not too hard) way of learning how to use data structures, arrays, and iteration in any language. You can (later, if you desire) extend it to support GUIs, input/output (editing the grid in real time, and saving the current grid), try your hand at some optimisation, or strive for compatibility with existing GoL grid formats. The possibilities are almost endless, and all of them are fun ways to learn something new.

Other wise, maze generators are fun. Try this fine article for a bunch of different algorithms of different complexity. Again, once you have a basic maze generator down, there are many, many ways of extending it. Interactivity is just the start. You can implement different algorithms and compare them, you can try and make mazes that are not square. You can try and generate the largest maze your computer can handle, and then optimise your code so it can generate even larger ones!

[D-503]

One fun thing you could try is experimenting with and modifying open source Python projects. You'll have an opportunity to learn from other's examples, and in some cases you might be able to help out by contributing your code back to the project. If you don't know what to contribute many projects have issue/feature request queues you can look at.
Github is one place where you can find such projects:
https://github.com/languages/Python

[Meem1029]

One project that can be fun is to implement a sentence generator using Markov chains. Basically, you read in a text, choose a random word, and then choose another random word based on how often each word followed the first. Repeat this however many times you want (or come up with some other stopping determination method).

[Shivahn]

Other wise, maze generators are fun. Try this fine article for a bunch of different algorithms of different complexity. Again, once you have a basic maze generator down, there are many, many ways of extending it. Interactivity is just the start. You can implement different algorithms and compare them, you can try and make mazes that are not square. You can try and generate the largest maze your computer can handle, and then optimise your code so it can generate even larger ones!

I just spent an hour trying going through that maze post and couldn't even remember how I'd gotten there. Thanks for sharing!

[Chaosboye]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I've started with Project Euler, and I'll see how far that takes me.

I definitely agree with the sentiment that I should read and modify the code of others. Luckily, there's the Red Spider Project and r/Python.

[Jplus]

I was going to advertise for the red spider project here but you already mentioned it.

For the record, the red spider project is designed specifically so that people can always add code of their own, so you're not restricted to modifying/extending code of somebody else. And it can be found both here in the Coding forum and on GitHub.