✅ Lost on what to do next
I recently completed a course (submitted the last task recently, the course is not fully over yet though) on C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, EF Core and a bit of Identity, however I am lost on what to do next. I'm pretty confident with the backend side of asp.net (I hate the frontend tbh) however probably still need some practice. I have no clue on what to do next. I am going to ask a very vague question, because I don't know how to ask it specifically .In your experience, for those who have taken a similar path, what would you recommend me to do?
10 Replies
make projects :)
$projects
Collections of application ideas that anyone can solve in any programming language to improve coding skills:
https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet-console-games
https://github.com/karan/Projects
https://github.com/florinpop17/app-ideas
here are some ideas ^
but youll probably have to write a frontend for it
but thats a good thing youll get some experience
You can decide if you want to go deeper into backend or if you wanna wrestle with the frontend.
You can choose to look into infrastructure as well by learning CI/CD using Github Actions for example. That'll teach you the basics of the dotnet CLI as well as basic unit testing etc.
Or you can try learning containerization with Docker, that'll most likely teach you some unix since you'll probably use unix containers.
You can also look into creating a simple web app that integrates with an external api, such as the European Central Bank for example, then you can try working on financial data before showing that in a GUI.
Or you can create a maze generator. This is an algorithmically interesting exercise, as you'll most likely have to implement the AStar algorithm as well as a depth/breadth-first search to find a solution fast or accurately.
Good luck!
Thanks for the advice ❤️❤️
What difficulty are you looking for?
I would recommend making something small but covers a decent amount of functional areas: database access, request parsing, response writing, data validation/sanitization are a few to start with. Some examples could be a to-do list app (I know I know), a recipe book app, a document catalog app, phone number lookup app. To name a few
I’ve fully made one project. Its a to do list asp.net mvc app. The way it works is: there is a separate api that talks with the database (sql server, ef core), then I have an api service class sort of thing, that the web app itself uses. I tried to make all of this following REST principles and other conventions. I also used Identity for authentication and authorization, however with default Identity configuration, didn’t get into that too much, just simple login and logout, with password restoration, registration etc. That is the experience I have. I enjoyed doing the backend, but hated the front (I can’t begin to explain how much I hated doing the front end).
So I am looking for something to do that has more to do with the backend
Something that will involve working with that side more than the frontend. (I know I can’t completely avoid it)
Well, backend can be a lot of things. Ideally you'll have an idea of what you want to do. Algorithmic exercises can be more "fun", but they're a bit rare. in my 5 years on my current job, I can count on one hand the times I needed algorithmic knowledge. But when I did need it I found it quite hard since I didn't know. So creating something algorithmically intensive is a good learning exercise.
You could look into creating a tiny distributed service application that is containerized, that has a web api you can use through swagger, that additionally has logging and logstorage in place. So an elk stack for example, or something a bit more modern if you so choose.
So imagine the end result once you're done is you start up a docker container, and open your browser and go to https://localhost:5000/swagger/index.html and you see a rich api that you can call. The web server receives your request, calls a different microservice inside your docker container (or a diff one), it makes a request to an integrated service, returns the response, you persist the response to a data storage (sql?), return the response to your user. And logs are generated for all of this that you can view in a gui (not made by you, a DaaS gui like kibana for example - there are docker images for this).
I love me some algorithm tasks, especially around Regex or string manipulation
But yeah, those kinds of problems are few and far in between
But good to know how Regex works
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/close - otherwise I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.