A Curated List of Coding Projects and Resources to Become a Better Developer



Coding Projects

Backend


Build a Hackernews clone backed by a GraphQL API

Tags: Backend, Fullstack, GraphQL

Level: Intermediate

A free and open-source tutorial to help us create a GraphQL app from zero to production, following best practices and using the programming language and framework of our choice.


Build a high-performance shopping cart app with ScyllaDB

Tags: Backend, Python, FastAPI, ScyllaDB

Level: Intermediate

Link to GitHub repo

The blog post discusses building a shopping cart app with ScyllaDB, Python and the FastAPI framework. You'll also learn how to use ScyllaDB's change data capture feature to query and export the history of all changes made to the tables.


Build a Rust RPG application that tracks Bluesky user experiences and events

Tags: Backend, REST API, Rust, ScyllaDB

Level: Intermediate

Link to the GitHub repo

Build an RPG application with Rust and ScyllaDB that can:


Build a low-latency video streaming app with NextJS, TypeScript and ScyllaDB

Tags: Backend, NextJS, TypeScript, ScyllaDB

Level: Intermediate

Link to the GitHub repo

You'll learn coding a video streaming application with features like listing all videos sorted by date, listing videos that the user has started watching along with the progress bar, and more, in addition to learning the data modeling process.



Systems Programming


Building a simple load balancer in Go

Tags: Go, systems programming

Level: Beginner, Intermediate

The tutorial guides us through creating a basic load balancer using the Go programming language.


CDN up and running: Building a CDN from scratch

Tags: Nginx, Lua, Prometheus, Grafana, systems programming

Level: Intermediate, Advanced

This GitHub repository offers a guide to building a Content Delivery Network (CDN) from scratch, leveraging technologies such as Nginx, Lua, Docker, Prometheus, and Grafana.

The project begins with creating a single backend service and expands from there to a multi-node, latency-simulated, observable, and testable CDN. Throughout the process, it discusses the challenges and trade-offs involved in building, managing, and operating a CDN, making it a valuable resource for those looking to deepen their knowledge in this area.



Data Engineering


Analyze railway traffic in the Netherlands with DuckDB

Tags: Database, data analytics, SQL, DuckDB

Level: Beginner, Intermediate

DuckDB is an in-memory analytical database designed for fast, efficient querying of structured data. Run analytical SQL queries on a real-world Dutch railway network dataset with the linked tutorial.


Implementing a data lake with DuckDB and AWS Lambdas

Tags: Data analytics, DuckDB, AWS

Level: Advanced

Link to the GitHub repo

The project uses DuckDB as a stateless query engine on a data lake using AWS Lambda. Instead of maintaining a traditional database server, queries are executed on-demand in a serverless environment, making it highly cost-effective and scalable.

It's a good project for learning data processing, query engines, and serverless.


Exploring StarCraft 2 data with Airflow, DuckDB, and Streamlit

Tags: Data analytics, DuckDB, Airflow

Level: Intermediate, Advanced

Link to the GitHub repo

A project that fetches data from the StarCraft II API, stores the results in DuckDB orchestrated via Airflow, and creates a Streamlit app to visualize the data.


Extract analytics from Bluesky

Tags: Database, data analytics, DuckDB, Python

Level: Intermediate

Extract analytics from Bluesky querying its open APIs and streams with DuckDB to build your own dashboards, tools and visualizations.


Build a data pipeline with DuckDB

Tags: Database, data analytics, DuckDB, SQL

Level: Intermediate

The project demonstrates how to build a real-time data pipeline using DuckDB to process environmental data from the UK's Environment Agency. The data is available on a public REST API, providing information about measures such as rainfall and river levels reported from various stations around the UK.

The project reads data from REST APIs and processes and stores it to be queried with various visualization tools.


More projects are on the way—stay tuned! Meanwhile, check out these learning resources.