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Ask HN: What was your first real project?

9 points by dlf ↗ HN
In order to get a better sense of what would be a good first problem to tackle as a beginner, I'm hoping a few of you would be willing to share what your first real project was as a beginner programmer. Thanks!

14 comments

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itsprofitbaron
I created my first website (on its own domain, hosting etc), when I was 15 and it involved selling icons on my desktop for $25/each. The buyer would then email me a picture which I converted into an icon, before displaying it on my desktop. The desktop was then replicated onto the website and I coded it so that the icons were linked to the particular website when you clicked on them.

It sounds lame but, it was profitable and I sold around 5 or 6 of them.

jasimq
My first non-academic project is www.pizooki.com

I made the site first in ASP.Net when I was learning web dev (because I knew C#). Then I later learned PHP developing the site.

It's broken in a lot of places but surprisingly people are using it. $0 in revenue though.

matznerd
An Ad-Sense website for a medium search volume term (<10,000 exact monthly searches). SEO'd the heck out of it until it ranked #1 and was making $1-$2 per day (>$30 per month).
cjstewart88
Mine was Tubalr. www.tubalr.com

In my opinion, think of something you would find useful and just go for it. Maybe think of ways you could make certain apps better if you where on their dev team... once you have something in mind, check to see if they have an API and see if you can build it out.

Good Luck

traxtech
When I was a student, I programmed KBlade, a KDE 1.x (C++/Qt) frontend to the MP3 encoder Bladeenc. I discovered later by pure luck that the software was distributed in Suse Linux. I was proud :)
jaredsohn
As a youth, I wrote a QBASIC program to quiz me about world/state capitals.
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chaosprophet
Mine was Ghostfox. I had enjoyed using ghostzilla and found it pretty nifty for browsing on my school computers, so when they folded and the browser started getting increasingly outdated, I hacked together an extension for Firefox using VB6 (gasp!) that mimiced the hiding and being shown as part of another app bit.

I believe that the ideal first project would be something you require for yourself, and probably something that you know might be a tad challenging too.

wj
My first real project was a CMS written in Perl for a hardware review website in 1996 or 97. No database backend. The CMS created html files (maybe shtml) and allowed them to be edited. Primitive but it worked.
kasrak
My first proper web app was ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com. It was a meeting ground for programmers and designers (and later entrepreneurs) who wanted to work together. Wrote it from scratch in PHP with a MySQL backend, launched in 2006, sold it a year later. It's still pretty much unchanged.
[dead] allenwong
http://newme.me Take a Coding+Fitness+Design+Language+Reading Challenge Together!!!!!

It is a need-to-do-every-day app, through a 7 day X challenge to help you achieve resolutions or goals.

It's not another To-do list.

JoeAltmaier
I wrote a game called Fly! on an Altair 8800 with 128b of RAM (yes, BYTES!). Toggled it in using the front panel switches. It made a little animated X-X fly around the text screen and bounce off the sides.