I wanted to use TheFuck on latest Linux Mint so I had to download the source and make some upgrades to make it work.

Another small project was a small app for extracting file differences between two folders, the idea was that I can mod games in windows, make a diff between vanilla and modded versions, then copy the diff onto my Linux machine and extract it into the game root installed there. Works great.

Do your todo apps, sudoku solver etc. Simple problems are fine. Don’t look down on them, don’t tell yourself that they’re too simple for you. There is always more complexity that you first expect once you start tackling it seriously.

Also, every self respecting tutorial ought to have exercises after every chapter. Don’t skip them either.

The only thing that really got me going was small applications I had some interest in. Writing games I will not play never kept my interest up for long. So I’ve been building mini tools I used for teaching numerics classes in meteorology (Python, Julia, Fortran, C) or code I would be using for some tinkering with microcontrollers or similar (Python, C++) when using new languages. For me personally, some iconic projects were a CO2 sensor with an attached display, or very simple internal gravity wave ray tracers. But that’s likely not what you’d be interested in. So without trying to suggest specific applications for you (many good examples in the responses :-) I’d advise to do something you’ll have fun with. Get yourself a small project that generates added value for you specifically (and fun is great added value in my eyes).

def main():
    print("Hello world")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

/s

I think a small one I worked on was extracting URLs from a CSV file in a certain column. Not too difficult, but a very specific use case.

A bit offtopic, but it’s relevant.

My first attempt to learn to code was more than a decade ago with python. I went through the basics, and decided to start a small project to practice. At the time python didn’t really have too many applications apart from automating tasks (before Hugo, flask, etc), so what did I think up? To make an automated propositional logic theorem prover. You input a formula, it tells you whether it’s a tautology or not.

Great idea, there are some relatively simple algorithms we’ve learned for pen and paper, it doesn’t seem too hard, etc. After a month I learned that it’s an extremely complex problem with billions invested in solving it because it’s directly relevant to PCB manufacturing.

That attempt failed horribly, and it took me a few more years and attempts before I found a good method. Web dev was actually crucial because I had direct feedback on simple logic.

So if you’re anything like me, make a blog from scratch or something else that’s actually simple, but gives you immediate visual feedback. And just to be clear, I ended up absolutely hating frontend, but it was a great stepping stone.

Check out pi pico and hardware/microprocessor programming. I found it easier to wrap my head around certain concepts when I had a practical application for them right in front of me.

Here’s a pretty small project that’s still practically useful, at least to me.

https://github.com/SinTan1729/recipe-box-for-wikijs

console blackjack is a good start. take bets, hit or stand, count cards correctly, pay out winnings. makes you think about data structures and sequences and so on.

alternatively, think of something you find annoying to do on the computer and try to automate it.

try this: make a python script which traverse given directory recursively and produce a graph which you can see using a svg viewer.

try to make it and experiment with it

!it will contain a horrendous bug if you are not careful!<

Python is excellent at repetitive, scripty task.

Open file, do something with input like extract, measures, rearrange and save work in other file.

Another stuff is display or analyse statistical data. Find “raw” data of any of your hobbie(cooking, video games,Sport) and transform them into nice looking charts.

A small script to append some characters to a string based on whether the letters in the file name were capitalized. Super simple, but I had a data migration project to a system that doesn’t recognize case and people before me coded information into case. It is essentially tutorial level but real life application. Maybe you have something similar? Practical and working before anything complex.

For basic mechanics it’s really good to start with a text based tic tac toe.

It forces you to use for loops, read from input, parse, arrays, small amount of state, rendering said state and conditionals.

To go the extra mile try to make it look tidy. This can be done by using a class to represent a state and having single purpose functions.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

It was a tiny TicTacToe server I made to learn machine learning. I basically played TTT against it and it would train on the former games to improve. It didn’t work since I’m not a data scientist, but at least I know how to create Web Sockets!

I can give you a few advice if you want

• Single Responsibility Principle: don’t do everything in the same place, separate between functions, classes or files. In my server, one file contained anything related to the server, another anything related to game logic and another anything related to machine learning.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel: unless you’re making it as an exercice, don’t create something that already exist as a library. Python is wonderful for its libraries
• Don’t optimize stuff: if you feel that “it could be faster”, either benchmark it or give up. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil”
• Learn how to make useful naming, tests and documentation: this is not something developers like to do but you’ll love yourself if you read your code after a few months
• Don’t code with an AI: If you’re bad without an AI, you’ll be bad with it. If you’re good with an AI, you’ll be good without it. You can still ask one for snippets or use it as a tool to discover concepts you don’t know about but I strongly advice against autocomplete and coding agents (I talk from experience).

If you don’t know how to start, you can make a really simple Tic Tac Toe game with its rules and play it in a CLI. Then you can decide how to pimp it: a better interface, game saves, an opponent played by the computer, a game server for a multiplayer game… you decide!

AWS Lambdas at work. None of them are particularly complex and the logic is often very targeted.

Edit: Just realized you said “hobby project”. For me, that would be a simple web scrapper.