I think what you need is inspiration, there’s so many things to build to improve your skills and broaden your knowledge. Not every project you work on needs to be novel and exciting, even basic things can provide ample complexity to learn new things.

For example, in c++ you can make a basic image viewer that takes the name of a file and displays it, using some library like SDL (or OpenGl/Vulkan(hard)). This would teach you a lot about file formats, dynamic memory allocation and managing it, graphics pipeline etc.

For html and css, you can try to recreate some cool websites you see online. I hope this gives an inspiration(best viewed on PC).

For problem solving there’s always leet code, advent of code and other similar services.

Here’s more stuff to get started

You can try to write programs you think would be a challenge for you (but still doable at your skill level). Write some games, bots that solve simple games like Tic Tac Toe or mods for your favourite (moddable) games. If you own a Raspberry Pi you could play around with the DPIO. Your free time projects are usually nothing too exciting or world-changing and that’s perfectly fine, they don’t have to be; the worthwhile part about them will be the practice they’ll offer.

Alternatively, you could try reading some theory, learn different types of data structures, sorting algorithms or pathfinding algorithms and their respective strengths and weaknesses. Or go deeper and prepare for higher Edu in CS by looking into the maths fundamentals, learn some linear algebra, discrete math, analysis or basic knot theory, it will help you a lot.

I thought this old antirez “mythical 10x programmer” post was pretty good:

http://antirez.com/news/112

Read/Inspect and contribute to FOSS. They’ll be bigger and longer lived than small, personal, and experimental projects.

Study computer science.

Work, preferably in an environment with mentors, and long-/continuously-maintained projects.

Look at alternative approaches and ecosystems. Like .NET (very good docs and guidance), a functional programming language, Rust, or Web.

That being said, you ask about “should”, but I think if it’s useful for personal utilities that’s good enough as well. Depends on your interest, goals, wants, and where you want to go in the future.

For me, managing my clan servers and website, reading online, and contributing to FOSS were my biggest contributors to learning and expertise.

The way I did it is by trying to solve more and more advanced problems with simpler tools/features, then looking at more advanced features and seeing where they could be applied to make the problem solving simpler. Rinse and repeat.

An easy example that I can remember is making arrays that dynamically expand. I started with the barebones malloc and worked out how to use std::vector (and other list types) in its place.

Understanding that concept is, what I believe, to be the foundation of learning programming.

I’m no pro whatsoever, but using this method really helps me pick up and learn new languages.

I found reading through the rust book was a nice walkthrough of problems one can hit and how that language elected to solve them.

In terms of practice:

• Write a vim config
  • Shell out to python if you’d like
• Learn a bit of elisp and org-mode
• Rewrite all your shell scripts into a python CLI
• Write a pyqt6 GUI for tasks and notes on the exact way you’ve always wanted it to work
• Write an AI tool to auto-format links etc with phi3
  • Very exciting how much these smaller models can do!

You need to think of things you might want to build. Try building software that nobody ever has, try fixing issues in current software using git. You can find lots of python program in GitHub, waiting for contributions. That’s how I learnt. If you want to learn and use C++, try building software that interacts with the real world with Arduino, try contributing to the Linux kernel or try making simple games using C++ in Godot.

As others have said, keep finding and building projects for yourself. Maybe get this book if you don’t have ideas of things you can build: Exercises for Programmers: 57 Challenges to Develop Your Coding Skills

I propose you contribute to Foss software that you use.

With that you are motivated because you are invested in the project, you will see the effect of your work and you learn about the process of contributing and working in a team.

That should keep you going for a while. Best of luck.

Does your school have a robotics team or something along the lines of computing? That would be a good option. Also if you are still in high school and plan on going to college, you still have plenty of time to learn.

I like to pick a fun project, pick a language I don’t know / wanna learn better, and then just go for it. Don’t be discouraged if somebody’s already made it - nothing says your learning project has to be useful in the real world, tho it’s kinda nice if you think of something that can be. If your project seems intimidatingly hard, remember the programmer workflow of breaking it down into manageable pieces and tackling those. If it doesn’t seem hard enough to teach you anything, I sometimes like to write it without using any external code or libraries (or a minimum of them; if it’s something like a GUI program I’ll use direct vulkan bindings instead of like Qt). This is also one of the few areas I get some use out of LLMs, cuz bullying ChatGPT or a local equivalent into giving me huge and tailored lists of program ideas can be really helpful. Either way my main advice is just to pick something that interests you and have fun with it; things don’t have to be worthwhile to other people to be worthwhile to you.

Try to replicate software/apps you use everyday. Not to improve them, but to figure out how they work. In addition to learning how they work, you’ll learn the problems the original devs had to solve, and one way to solve them.

Join in on your school clubs and research projects, or start some with friends!

There are many great competitions where previous programming experience would come in handy.

One competition that takes place in the U.S.:

NASA Student Launch

It actually IS rocket science! Student Launch is a 9-month long challenge that tasks student teams from across the U.S. to design, build, test, and launch a high-powered rocket carrying a scientific or engineering payload. It is a hands-on, research-based, engineering activity and culminates each year with a final launch in Huntsville, Alabama home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The activity offers multiple challenges reaching a broad audience colleges and universities as well as middle and high school aged students across the nation.^[1]

Culminating Event Dates: April 30 – May 4, 2025

Culminating event location: Huntsville, AL

Eligibility: Open to U.S. Students

Grade Levels: Grades 6-12, College and University

If you want to improve significantly, go read someone else’s code and modify it. Try to fix a bug in a program you use, add a feature you want that doesn’t exist already, or even just do something simple for the sake of proving to yourself that you can do it – like compiling it from source and figuring out how to change some small snippet of text in a message box. Even if you don’t succeed, if you put in a serious effort attempting it, you will almost certainly learn a lot from trying.

Edit: changed wording to try to be clearer

Its a tough problem. You have to find something that you want to exist; like an app or a website or a game. For example, try making a GUI for managing SSH keys. You know, like the ones github makes you create in order to clone and push to a repo. Make a visual representation of those keys (stored in the .ssh folder), and tools to add/delete them.

Along the way you’ll find tons of missing things, tools that should exist but don’t. Those are the “real” projects that will really expand your capabilities as a developer.

For example, I was coding in python and wanted to make a function that caches the output because the code was inherently slow.

• but to cache an output we need to know the inputs are the same
• hashes are good for this but lists can’t be hashed with the built-in python hash function
• we can make our own hash, but hashing a list that contains itself is hard
• there is a solution for lists, but then hashing a set that contains itself is a serious problem (MUCH harder than hashing a list)
• turns out hashing a set is the same problem as the graph-coloring problem (graph isomorphism)
• suddenly I have a really deep understanding of recursive data structures all because I wanted to a function that caches its output.