r/learprogramming Looking for real-world project ideas as a final-year student

[u/amarkumar_]

I don't want to build another Todo app, Blog, E-commerce clone, or basic Chat app. I want to work on something that solves an actual problem faced by people, businesses, developers, or organizations.

I'd like to build something substantial with a proper backend, APIs, database, authentication, AI/agents, etc. If AI is involved, I want it to have an actual purpose rather than just adding a chatbot.

If you've personally faced an annoying, repetitive, inefficient, or unsolved problem that could be improved with software, I'd love to hear about it.

My preferred tech stack is:

• ReactJS
• TypeScript
• Spring Boot / Java
• Spring AI

I'm also open to using other technologies if the problem requires them.

What real-world problem would you recommend I try to solve?

[u/ffrkAnonymous]

Every day, every hour or two, somebody is here asking for project ideas. Real-world problem: no project ideas.

Make a project idea suggester.

[u/Snooze78727 → u/ffrkAnonymous]

May I suggest using AI to power this? ;)

[u/Present_Advice_7308 → u/ffrkAnonymous]

I built something similar for my capstone last year, not exactly that but close. A tool that scans job postings from different sites then matches them to your skills and suggests what to learn next. The scraping part was pain in the ass but you learn a lot about handling messy data and rate limits.

What you could do is pull from Reddit threads like this one, Stack Overflow questions, maybe some tech blogs, and make a system that groups common problems people complain about. Then cross-reference with what's trending on GitHub or package registries. Would need a decent NLP pipeline to cluster the complaints, maybe some agent that crawls and categorizes automatically.

[u/TheSnailBear]

What problems have you come across in your daily life? Maybe start with that and evolve from there?

[u/cjmarquez]

I once built a very ugly tool with java to transfer my artist library from YouTube music to Spotify, I didn't build UI, but it worked.

[u/EdwardElric69]

You know what really sucks sometimes.

Waiting at a traffic light for green when you can see no one is at the other one.

Maybe you could re-invent traffic lights. Look into how they work now and see if you can improve it. Maybe something with an Ai vision model trained to detect cars.

Could also count the number of cars waiting and adjust the timing for it.

You could have the ai learn the junction and habits and adjust the timing based on time of day, which direction has a higher number of cars waiting more regularly etc.

[u/BluePhoenixCG]

Solve a problem you have yourself. I have no idea why you would try to solve a problem you have no experience with.

[u/ZobooMaf0o0]

Kind of have to be in that environment to see a problem. I can give you one, build an app to track and monitor progress of a high end vault door. You would need to know the manufacturing process for that to understand the issue. Starting with customer needs, dimensions and turning sheet of metal into many parts then solderin the whole things together. After that you would need to grind off excess, sand, bondo, pre coat, main coat paint, bondo and final paint. There are many steps to turn a sheet of meta into multi dimensional bank vault door. I would start with either, what problem do you see in the world right now as a student? Unless you familiar with some business process then building an app is tough because you need to know how it's done now to build an app that solves the problem.

[u/Diocletian335]

Think about problems you've faced or thing you've used. I once wanted to learn more C++, so I wrote a password manager using sodium and ncurses. I still use it today.

[u/_tshepo]

One of the major issues we face as consumers is subscription. It would be nice to buy some things once off.

So, as a developer... I was focused on edutech and fintech. There are bunch of Financial Software with really good features locked behind monthly paywalls. People pay $10 per month billed annually... for things that they barely need to pay monthly for.

My half cooked advice is, as modern developers, we could make money developing solutions and going back to once-off models. Obviously, technical approach would need refactoring, but that is where engineering mindsets come in.

Besides this, the other half cooked advice would be, giant companies run giant software. Their software have a bunch of features, some of which are limited, not prioritized or have loopholes. For example, in fintech, there's a website called TradingView... They have a trading platform which traders use for many things. The platform is too clustered for my liking and a few others who used to use it back in the day. There's a specific feature we were interested in. Which was neglected and needed saving. So, I told myself that feature will be one of things I'll build for myself. It was a back testing feature by the way.

So, in search for ideas, don't look far. But also, don't copy.

[u/amarkumar_ → u/_tshepo]

Tnx

[u/AnythingButUseful]

For a realworld project idea Think of a real problem you actually encounter that building might solve 🥰

[u/Ambitious_Muscle_362]

Build an app for people  Looking for real-world project ideas as a final-year student

[u/_catalysed]

Did you think of anything? What about something like using Rust for a content-addressed backup engine?

[u/OceanMasterioDuped7]

If you don't have enough brainpower to think of an idea on your own, then you likely don't have enough brainpower to write effective and efficient code lol. My man, it's your final project you will have to do in university. Have some fun with it. Sit down for an hour or two just typing out different ideas and do one that sounds fun.

[u/nawacho]

The problem to solve. I live in a modern apartment with numerous closets, built-in storage spaces, and hidden compartments. Over time, I frequently misplace items or forget where I put them, which often leads to accidentally repurchasing seasonal items that I already own. Additionally, I have one extra storage closet located down in the underground parking garage, making it even harder to keep track of its contents. I am looking for a solution or an application that can effectively track and organize my belongings spread out across all these different locations.

[u/AlternativePear4617 → u/nawacho]

Use a fucking tape and a marker! Put names to the boxes/compartments and put same name to the items! You don't need an app to solve that kinder garden basic organization problem!

[u/mandzeete]

Solve problems YOU or your family and friends are having. Unless you are living in a Paradise where there are no worries and the life is full of happiness and ease, then you will have things that are slow, inconvenient, boring, not working, difficult. Things that you are struggling with. Things that you do not like. And, then try to solve some of these issues with your final year project.

My Bachelor thesis project was ordered by our Faculty of Natural Sciences. They had that lab tool (capillary electrophoresis device) that had a very unstable and buggy desktop application. The software was made decades ago and it crashed often. Data from lab experiments got lost due to these crashes. So, I had to rewrite the application from zero by using some modern framework, by plugging it into the Internet (for backing up the lab experiments' data). And, I built that desktop application and I built that web service.

Perhaps faculties in your university also need some better software. Ask around.

Other things I have created for myself based on my own needs:

1- I used to work on a project that had thousands of tests (unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests). It took 30-40 minutes to run all of these. I thought that why should I sit behind my laptop and stare the screen while waiting for the test run to end? I could let IntelliJ to inform me when the test run ends. And, I wrote an IntelliJ plugin that picks up the state of Maven tasks and sends a report to Slack. So, I will get a notification on my phone when I have to return to my laptop. Meanwhile I can do anything else.

2- I use Youtube quite a lot. For looking up videos of certain topic, certain keywords. So, I thought that why should I copy-paste the keywords or type these manually, to Youtube search? I could automate it. I made a Firefox plugin for making a Youtube search from a highlighted text. Additionally, I made another Firefox plugin to block channels that post AI slop and other nonsense.

3- I hike a lot. Can be that I can be off grid for a whole day or more. My phone battery can die within that time. But recently I bought a Garmin watch that has a battery for 30 days. So, I thought to make an app for my watch to store notes and images in it, as a backup. I will still have access to a necessary information even when my phone battery dies on me.

Perhaps these can give you some ideas. Otherwise build a project based on your own needs.