Nobody cares about your coding projects (but here's how to make them care)

Nobody cares about your To Do List app. Nobody cares about your color picker 4000. If you see my video where I talk about three types of projects that you need to be a great programmer. If I make those clones, do I believe my future boss will give even the smallest shit about them and congratulate me for writing beautifully written code? Dude, I am kidding your kiddo Projects, they do matter, they care but just need to stand out and you need to learn how to stand out. So in this video we will talk about how to actually make people care about your projects. My my name is Phil. I became a senior developer without a CS degree at the age of 30 and to get to this point I've built a whole bunch of apps in countless different ways. If you find this video useful, please like comment and share and subscribe. It helps others find this video and it also helps me understand that every app is the same. Those clones that you do are important for stacking your skill. You just need to understand you should add your own flavor to these clones before you add them to your resume. And an example I have about that is it's like an Instagram clone but I wanted to add some like blockchain NFT features to it. This there are many like same things of apps, right? Maybe it wasn't like exactly like NFTs but I wanted to add blockchain to it and I'll show you an example. So it was called, it's called Burner Gram. Funny thing is I like haul my projects like Burner or like Node Burners are just like throwaway projects. This is very eye opening because I kind of like built out like a lot of the Instagram features like uploading photos and all that kind of stuff. And I wanted to like make an app where it was kind of like Instagram and like the photos were, they could become NFTs and people could purchase those NFTs. I had something like purchase credits. You could purchase the credits and it would add credits into your account and buy the photos. You just have to like put like think of an app because honestly all these apps are like very similar Instagram Facebook threads. They're kind of all same just packaged differently and but with like a different UI or UX and then like one little differentiating feature and everybody's going to like expect the features like uploading a photo, uploading a status, signing up with Google, signing up with Facebook and all this kind of stuff. They're going to expect that kind of stuff. But then what is going to differentiate your app so that's like your own flavor of the app. So mine was like, people can upload them and then make them NFTs, and then people can buy them. I thought that would be a pretty cool idea. This is kind of like, example of it. So I had like a purchase screen where you could buy credits and notify people, and then you could upload your photos and see if it was like a, you know, and then people could interact with it. You can put a description. It would have a common count, support count and the support, it's kind of like a like. But they would support it by like sending like some credits. It was interesting to build and it was a cool idea at the time. And it was like my own little flavor on like an Instagram. So it kept it kind of more fun to build and keep me going. That's why I always encourage mentorees or mentees to kind of like build what they want to build, but also put their own flavor on it. Because you're gonna have to have your own flavor on it to like, kind of like market it in the future. I do have, like, one really cool project that we're working on right now. It's like a playlist app. I hope it's going to have a lot of users. I think it'll be interesting. I'm excited to share that with you guys in the future. At this level, nobody expects you to add value to society through your app. There are project managers or stakeholders whose job is to find the business logic to solutions. Your job is to translate into technical solutions. When you build these clones, try to understand why Instagram made certain things the way they did instead of just copying and cloning. Yeah, you have to be able to break down and come up with reasons on why you made certain choices. For example, I was working on a big social networking app. We were expecting to have a lot of users. So this is like a community app that needs comments. And I remember I made a decision on this code like that, I think in V1 I made like the comment table or comment collection and then I made a comment replies collection. And I thought that was getting a little bit too unruly. I thought it was getting. So I just, I included both the comments and replies into one collection by adding a parent field. So if that comment had a parent as and it had, or if it was null, that would mean that it was a comment to the post. And then if it was comment to a comment, the parent would be the ID of the comment that it was getting replied to. That Was like a decision that I made. It made a lot of sense to me to kind of like break it down and kind of like have less collections later on in my MongoDB. But it did add more complexity, but it reduced like the amount of collections that I would need and the things that I would need to manage later. I thought the code was interesting and it was a decision that I made. It worked out for me, actually. So, you know, like in the comments, like if I had a comment and then it's like a comment to add and then I create some kind of comment from the factory and then if there's any mentions, I would add the mentions and then if the parent comment was true, then I would add mentions to add dot push to the push comment commenter. And I know that gets quite confusing, but then, then the inserted comment would be the comment to add with dimensions to the set to get rid of any kind of duplicates that were inside of the mentions. And then it would insert the comment. And I thought it was pretty clever. I like the way I did it. So, you know, I like come up with these decisions and maybe we were a bigger team, I would have had that replies collection. But it was like, it was like a five person team. So we had to come up with our own like solutions to kind of optimize things and make things faster. I think of it kind of like a boxer. Like when you're watching it on TV or a sports team, you're like, hey, why aren't they doing something? As a programmer you're like, okay, I could do it that way, but it's going to take too much time. It's going to take a lot of resources. So I'm doing it this way. It's like the best decision right now. That's kind of some things you have to kind of run into as you like get into these projects, you know, and then later on in like interview or something, if you like have to show off a project or talk about a project, because they're going to probably talk, ask you things like, oh, what was like a decision you've made that you weren't sure was correct? Or. But you could like say, you could give an argument for why you thought it was correct and then you could like kind of go right to an example and then kind of talk about it. And I think the interviewer or whatever would like really appreciate you being able to articulate like your ideas and things like that. That's something that I did. After you finish your project, tell your friends and Family to actually create an account on your app and start using it. If you are building something that you want your friends and family to use, don't you think you'll build something that will actually be worth using? Nothing is more impressive to an employer than actually having people use your app. Like, everyone wants to build like great software and build cool software where they come up with like cool solutions, but in the end it's like, is it going to bring users in and is it going to create revenue because users equal revenue in the end. Right? Or potential for revenue. If I have. If I can just kind of like point to kind of like a project, a small project that I made a long time ago. It was an app selling whiskey, like alcohol, like an E Commerce. Have it open here. It was. It's just a react native app with some cloud functions and things like this. And I think I used some kind of a node js, like E Commerce framework, Medusa. I'll tell you guys about that in a later story. Basically there is like themes and this is like all the ui, the app. But I mean the one thing I wanted to show you guys was maybe like the database with like the users. And this had like plenty of users. Like each of these IDs will be users. And I'm not gonna really dox their like emails or anything, but just like a bunch of users. I think it had like a thousand users. And then I think we found out that it was like illegal to sell alcohol through an app on online. So the company had to get rid of the app. But it was, it was fun while it lasted. And we got. It was, you know, like seeing the money come in was really fun. It's always like a project that'll have in like back pocket, you know that I can say like, hey, we built this app. It would have been a huge success if it's actually legal. It's. I think it's funny. It had a bunch of pages, it had a bunch of products and it was fun. So it was. It's something that I can be very proud about too. You know, you release something and then it kind of catches and you get like all these users and it's fun seeing like the new user account and then like the money coming in in your payment gateway, the orders happening. And then it's fun because then like your next employer will be like, okay, like what's a project that you're really proud of or that got users? And then you can kind of think of that example and be like, oh, this and this and this happened. I thought of this idea and I talked with my team and I think in the end you do realize you can write the most beautiful software. In the end, if it doesn't have any users, it's, I mean it's kind of like a business. Like a business teacher is always going to ask you or professors are going to ask you, okay, the business sounds cool. Is it making money or is it not? If not, then it's a horrible business no matter what. If it is okay, it's a good business. And so same with software, you know, like you always have to think like when someone comes in front of my piece of software or like they're unusual, what is like the exact goal of, can they achieve the goal easily, why they're using your software. If you can kind of accomplish that in the most simple way, that's a great app. If you're new and you're building an app or you want to build an app, or if you've built an app, just get your friends and family to use it, market it, you know, be that guerrilla marketer yourself and get people to use it and be proud of what you build. You can see those users, you know, come into your database and all that kind of stuff, which I think will be very, very motivating actually. So if you want to have an edge and want to learn the way I learned to get to this level, join the discord and find like minded people who are all trying to level up. I also offer a free JavaScript course, a project based one, to show you a glimpse of what you'll be doing on the job. Nobody cares about your projects because you're doing the same thing as the next guy or girl. You are taking these clones and changing a few colors and calling your own project. Add your own flavor to come up with your great name. Have a friend make a logo for you, or even you make a logo to have people in your life, your circle, use the app and most importantly, be able to explain your decisions and your choices. A technical interview is a small amount of time you have to convince the interviewer why you should care. You don't need to build dozens of apps to impress them, just build one amazing one. With all these things we talked about earlier, remember? If I can do it, you can do it too. Coding saves lives.