6 Small Projects that Will Boost Your Developer Resume

Do you want to stand out from the crowd as a job candidate? Here are six small projects that can help you impress your potential employer in your very first job interview.

Own Github Action

GitHub Actions let you customize CI / CD workflows using a configuration file right in your GitHub repository.

You can even publish your Actions to the GitHub Marketplace so other users can add them to their own repositories.

To get started, you just need to create an action.yml file in a specific format. Inside this file, you can have several steps in which different scripts in different languages ​​can be executed, and you can pass parameters between them.

You can find detailed guidelines here.

Chrome extension

Chrome Extensions are small programs that help you browse the web by allowing users to tailor Chrome features to their individual needs or preferences.

The best part is that you can create an extension by simply using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

If you want to see how this works, feel free to find more information here. The possibilities are endless, and putting your extension on the Chrome Web Store is definitely a great fit for your resume.

Google Maps API project

It’s hard to imagine how many apps use the Google Maps API. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, and many more. We only used the JavaScript version of this API and found it intuitive. You can find the official documentation here.

The API is easy to use, even if you are just starting to learn to program. However, you can use it to create your own version of Uber or a game like Plague Inc.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) project

OCR is a technology that you can use to read and extract text from any image. You can create a document digitizing app or an instant translation app.

Luckily, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel because you can just use a Tesseract based library like pytesseract. For the best results, you need to convert the image to grayscale, increase the contrast and sharpness, and make sure the image is aligned. Or, you can simply use the Amazon Recognition API.

Slack-based application

Slack provides users with APIs for building apps and automating processes.

Endtest is a great example of such an app. This is a really simple example as all it does is sending a summary of the test results to a specific user in the Slack channel.

But the Slack API goes far beyond that. You can connect it to any external service and use your Slack channel as the interface for that service.

Build a native API

There is an API for almost everything today. A great way to come up with a new API is to build something that many developers would use, but that cannot be done with just a few lines of code.

Don’t forget about versioning and be careful with changes! After you finish your API, you can publish it to sites like RapidAPI. It’s a great experience because you have to think from the perspective of other developers and keep things as simple as possible.

Have fun with programming and stay tuned with Software Focus!