What Makes a Good First Project?
You've learned the fundamentals — now it's time to build something real. But what should you build? The right first project reinforces your skills, produces a satisfying result, and sets you up for success with AI-assisted development.
Criteria for a Good First Project
Your first project should be:
Small and completable. You should be able to finish it in one or two coding sessions. Nothing kills motivation like an endless project that never feels done.
Uses skills you've learned. The project should exercise variables, conditions, loops, and functions. This reinforces your learning through application.
Produces a useful or interesting result. When you finish, you should have something that actually does something — not just code that exists.
Avoids unnecessary complexity. Skip web interfaces, databases, and complex libraries for now. Focus on core programming logic.
Think of it like your first woodworking project. You build a simple box, not a cabinet. The box teaches you the fundamentals you'll need for bigger projects later.
Our Project: Number Base Converter
For this mini-project section, you'll build a number base converter — a program that converts numbers between decimal, binary, and hexadecimal.
This project is perfect because:
- It's genuinely useful (developers work with different number bases regularly)
- It uses all the fundamentals you've learned
- It has clear inputs and outputs
- It's completable in a few hours
- It connects to concepts from Track 1
AI Collaboration Practice
This project is also practice for real-world AI-assisted development. You'll:
- Use AI to help plan features
- Ask AI to generate code for specific functions
- Review AI output critically
- Iterate to improve the code
- Learn from AI explanations
The goal isn't to have AI do everything — it's to practice the collaborative workflow you'll use throughout your career.
What You'll Build
By the end of this section, you'll have a working command-line tool that:
- Accepts a number and its current base
- Converts to other bases
- Handles invalid input gracefully
- Is code you understand and can explain
Let's get started.