:bulb: These are ideas for personal projects to develop my technology skills

:man: Personal Website

For my first personal foray into technology, why not start with a personal website. This site is open source, you can view the code at kits-dna. The repository name was inspired by crisp-dna, but is an insight into my inner workings rather than a consulting company.

I'm going to use the sites blog to start writing my thoughts. Thinking and writing are two crucial non-technical skills that I want to grow with this project :thought_balloon:

Building kits-dna

My site is hosted on GitHub Pages and built using Jekyll. The theme is Minima, with some custom HTML and CSS. I built the site entirely on my iPad Pro using GitHub Codespaces.

I created the homepage image myself by drawing bikablo style visuals. I'm terrible at drawing but I'm pleased how well they turned out. The Apple Freeform app helped me out by smoothing some lines. Hopefully product people will recognise what the visuals represent. The site logo is AI generated using DALL.E.

Check out my blog for more on building kits-dna if you're interested.

Building the site got me started with markup code, and design. Learning a programming language is next up.

:cat: Scratch

Why not start learning programming like a kid. Scratch is an MIT project to help kids get into programming by using a fun graphical approach. Scratch is available online and also comes installed on Raspberry Pi OS.

Check out my Scratch projects.

:snake: Python

Next step is learning a text based programming language. I’m planning to follow Replit’s 100 days of code course to learn python. On day 100 you build a product price scraper. Not sure what product/s I’ll scrape but this course should be a good introduction to programming.

"Everybody in this country should learn how to programme a computer, because it teaches you how to think" - Steve Jobs

:gift: Product

Increasing the ambition level a bit now. I’ve got an idea for a product. Being a product manager, I want to solve a problem, but I might end up in a product anti-pattern and prototype a solution to a problem that I have. This project will combine new found technical skills with my product skills.

:robot: My Tech Stack

  • iPad Pro
  • Raspberry PI 4
  • GitHub
  • Git
  • Jekyll
  • ChatGPT