Programming foundations

Stage 6 of 6 · 8 lessons · ~3 months

Build and ship your first projects

Turn skills into finished, shareable work: small programs that solve a real problem, with dependencies managed, tests on the core logic, a README and a history of honest commits.

Start: Scoping a small project

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

  1. 1Scoping a small project
  2. 2Maven or Gradle builds
  3. 3Files and JSON with Jackson
  4. 4Calling a public API with HttpClient
  5. 5Configuration and secrets
  6. 6Tests with JUnit
  7. 7README and a short demo
  8. 8Publishing on GitHub

Start with

  • GitHub repoFree
    Project Based Learning

    Community maintained · Beginner

    Follow one guided build in your language, then build your own without a guide

Keep handy

  • Free APIs that give a small project real data to work with

Also worth your time

Before moving on: Ship two projects on GitHub that solve a problem you or someone you know actually has, each with a README, tests for the core logic, a clean commit history and a two-minute demo video or GIF.

Tauseef's advice
Scope every project smaller than you think, finish it, and write the README before you call it done. One finished tool with tests says more than three abandoned clones of big products, and the logic must be yours: use AI to explain an error, not to write the feature.

Mark this stage as not done?