12 Software Projects in 2021

4 min readDec 23, 2021

At the start of the year I created two new years resolutions. The first was to run a marathon and the second was to create a portfolio worthy software project each month. I will show you the struggles and successes I had in creating each of these twelve projects.

January: Web Development Portfolio

The hardest part about this project was following a process from researching what recruiters look for, defining requirements, using a Trello board, and designing the UI, down till the time I finally completed the project.

February: Portfolio using React.JS

February, I started learning about the React framework because of a suggestion from my mentor, Joshua Reed. At first I could not see the point in using the framework but its usefulness quickly became obvious as I began to take advantage of the reusable components in creating the react version of my portfolio.

March: FreeCodeCamp HTML projects

Once again my mentor introduced me to an amazing resource for learning web development this time in the form of FreeCodeCamp. I created projects for each of the 5 projects. The most difficult part of this project was keeping up with each of the projects and ensuring they got the tests to pass. While the projects themselves were not incredibly difficult, designing and developing 5 projects in a month was a challenge.

I also was trying to get a better understanding of agile development and how it differed from the waterfall method by competing the courses Agile Foundation and Scrum: The Basics from LinkedIn Learning.

April: 30 Days JS Challenge

The 30 Days of Javascript challenge got me back diving into Javascript logic after all that design stuff. Much like doing the 5 FreeCodeCamp projects completing a JS30 challenge every day took increasing discipline. Here is the result Javascript 30 project completed.

May: Pong

At the same time, I was also teaching my two friends two different programming languages. When I asked them to choose the language they wanted to learn the result was I taught one C++ and the other Python rather than web development. Since I eventually wanted to make this into a business I attempted to make it as fun as I could through game development. This in mind I created a simple Python pong game.

June: Hangman

Yes, I made hangman. Okay, so maybe this one is not at all portfolio worthy. June I spent most of my time in LinkedIn learning completing online courses and improving my core skills in typing speed, Git, and VSCode.

July: Currency Converter

Keeping in my python trend I created a currency converter that took a quantity of one currency and tells you how much it equates to in another. To do this I found a API from rapidapi and gained just enough knowledge of Tkinter to complete it. Here is the github repo for the currency converter.

I also completed the FreeCodeCamp JavaScript algorithms projects. View the code for a few of these projects here.

August: AWS Published Portfolio

AWS has a ton of resources and it can be hard to know what to do with. One of those resources though is S3 which I used to take my completed portfolio onto a real website with my name as the URL. Here is my online portfolio.

September: Bootstrap Toastmasters, Firebase

September I began NuCamp’s Full Stack bootcamp to help me develop web development skills and projects and eventually help me land a job. After five weeks I created a bootstrap project. The part that tested me the most was deployment as it is more manual labor in this case than just letting Netlify call ‘yarn build’ using the code from my GitHub repository. I also started learning Angular MEAN stack in a full stack course at BYU-I which I later used to create the Fanowrimo project. The Midway toastmasters website at the time seemed a bit cluttered and I figured I could come up with a simpler design.

I also was looking into firebase as a simple database option and completed several tutorials related to that such as SuperChat and this authentication project in an attempt to choose a backend for the Fanowrimo project my family had requested I build.

October: React Toastmasters

The second portion of NuCamp was on the react library teaching me about how to use React Navigation, Thunk, and Redux. Combining this knowledge and redesigning the bootstrap design I created and deployed this newer version.

November: FreeCodeCamp Front End and Data projects

At this point I was still continuing to build on the react Toastmasters app. However, I also continued my FreeCodeCamp education getting through a good portion of the Front end and Data Visualization portion.

Data Visualization

December: Fanowrimo

Finally after completing the MEAN stack course by Maximilian Schwarzmüller I felt ready to complete this website my family requested. I finished off the month with building off of the posts project from the course and delivered on the completed Fanowrimo project! This is a website that allows writers to record their progress towards their word count on their novel for National Novel Writing Month. The full stack BYU-I course also led me to create this project.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading about my efforts in web development. I hope to some degree you can learn from some of my mistakes and be inspired to take on new challenges in 2022. This past year has been filled with turmoil and I varied significantly from my original plan but despite all these setbacks I completed 12 projects as intended and learned the important lessons of refining my software development process, staying focused on one project at a time, advancing core skills in Git, VSCode Hotkeys, typing speed, and choosing one area of web development to focus my time on. Now I am moving on to applications to Front end developer jobs to get one within the next year. What are your 2022 web development goals?