Python Projects That Produce Portfolio

Perhaps you are a beginner Python learner and you are searching for ideas to advance your coding skill. In this stage, you have followed several Python 3 tutorials but you feel like you can't build anything with what you've learned. Don't be so upset, I felt the same way when I was in that moment. What you can do is building a Python project that suit your passion. But what Python programming project ideas for a beginner like me?

Python is a versatile programming language. You can do almost anything with Python. There is only one area (as far as I know) that Python hasn't been able to penetrate, mobile app. That means you have to make a decision first where do you want to go with Python? Game development, desktop app (GUI), web app, web crawling and data mining, data science or other. Even some less popular domains to programming such as networking and security, bioinformatics, GIS, language, forensic are now using Python.

Don't be shy or afraid to re-write what other Python programmers have done. Select one of following Python programming project ideas and find two or three more tutorials. You'll gain skill, logic and experience to build something applicable.

1. Game (PyGame)

Once you finished this PyGame tutorials from Sentdex, you can visit PyGame website to get project ideas that suit you. You can browse thousands of PyGame projects available on the site. There are about 30 categories (2d, 3d, shooter, rpg, simple, retro, etc.) on the top of the page. You can pick one, follow the link to the repository on GitHub. In the end, I am pretty sure you will say 'I think I can create similar to this one'.

2. Desktop App (Tkinter)

Python has one standard GUI library, TkInter. However, you can find dozens of Python frameworks for desktop app development that you can install. Some famous libraries are PyQT, Kivy, PySide, PyGTK and WxPython.

3. Web App (Flask and Django)

You can start learning Flask by following Corey Schafer tutorial series on Youtube. This Flask Python tutorial provides a Flask example of building a blog app that suitable for beginners. If you need more coding practice, try to follow another flask tutorial series by sentdex. This tutorial series is perfect for beginners and teach you how to build an e-learning site.

4. Web Crawler/Scraper

Is collecting data and information from websites fascinate you? Probably that is the reason why you learn Python in the first place. That means it is time to learn the web crawling by using Python. There are two main libraries in Python to do it, Scrapy and Beautiful Soup.

Parsing the website content and pulling out information that we really want is quite challenging task. The information that we need can be located on the title, content of the web, tables, lists, the images or the links available on a page.

Scrapy and Beautiful Soup are two Python libraries which are commonly used to do this task. Here is a Python Scrapy tutorial series you can follow. By the end of the tutorial, there will be a practical challenge that can give you ideas to scrape certain information from a web page.

5. Machine Learning

So, you are ready to play around with data and program a specific task that will improve the performance progressively? That means that you are ready to jump right in the machine learning world. Sentdex has an in-depth tutorial series about this topic. He covered regression, classification with k-nearest neighbors and support vector machines, clustering with flat clustering a hierarchical clustering and also deep learning with neural networks. So check his first video right away.

Conclusion

You can see now several Python programming project ideas for beginners. There are many more projects that you can build with Python, but I can't stress this enough that you must stick with one Python application that you really like.

In my opinion, having a project idea that you want to pursue before you start learning Python will make you learning Python more enthusiastically.