October 12, 2022
Photo by: Campaign Creators at Unsplash.com
If I could sum up beginner full stack portfolio project ideas, it would be any beginner front end project with a database added on.
If you wanted to stop reading there, I wouldn't blame you, but for specifics, stay tuned.
Complexity will increase depending on what we're saving and loading from our external source.
First, simply saving interactive data that could potentially be saved with localStorage is a nice start simply for the project exercise.
I say as a beginner, it's important to limit scope when trying something that's very new. It's all too easy to get huge ideas that are very difficult to know the scope of when starting out and that transpires into getting overwhelmed and not finishing the project. For complete basic projects, and a little front end knowledge for layout and design, these 3 projects are my go to stepping stones to larger projects.
1. Todo List with a database
The most basic example of a project with full stack capabilities would be a simple todo list, but one that saves todo list item data to an external database. You'll have to create some basic CRUD operations for your database, which if you've never done before can be quite a challenge to deploy.
User authentication would be an additional layer of complexity that I would consider an intermediate level project. Many project tutorials will showcase adding external authentication through google or github, which can be a good alternative to saving user login data yourself.
2. E-Commerce site
An E-Commerce site with Stripe would be a good exercise that's not too overwhelming, but let's you add lots of small front end details like page transitions and animations that lead to a polished final product that'll impress a hiring development lead. Stripe has an extensively documented API that is used in many small businesses to handle payment processing, letting you have a full e-commerce site with just the front end and a backend that only needs to deal with customer orders. The transactions shouldn't charge or do anything, but knowing that it works is all that's needed to showcase an impressive final product.
3. Pizza Delivery App
Create an API to load the toppings and orders with a database, and the front end site with the pizza photos. You can also get more advanced with features like pagination, search, and filters for pizza types. The app won't do anything on sending an order, of course, but by creating the API with Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations for orders and pizza toppings, you've created a full stack application that's not too overwhelming, but can look very nice and impress developers or hiring teams.
In conclusion
There are of course many more creative ideas if you'd like to explore those, but I feel that creating and deploying an API is a tried and true project for a starter. Self learning is very difficult already, and it's important to control scope to not only not get overwhelmed, but to have something deliverable within a reasonable timeframe. There's nothing worse than having a project that ends up taking two or three times your time estimate, and having nothing to show for it. So, my approach is to have a small scope at first, and then add on new capabilities and features that are commonly implemented patterns you may find in a real world project.