Kick Start Your Side Projects With Public Data

Are you stuck looking for a project so that you can start building an app?

Are you a beginner looking to get into programming?

Are the projects that you are following on tutorial sites too boring for you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you must be stumped and are eagerly seeking to keep your flame burning for coding before it runs out.

Starting From Scratch Sucks

I am a big advocate for side projects, so much so that it helped me secure an internship with a hyper growth startup! Therefore, I wanted to start off the New Years guns blazing with pet projects, so I decided to create an an API for one of my favorite arcade fighting games Marvel VS Capcom 2.

Now that I have finished those projects, I am back to the drawing board, so I decided that it was time for me to learn mobile development by jumping head first into Swift.

In order for me to grasp new concepts, I usually have to make the code relatable to my interests. Usually, I search up an API related to my interests in order for me not to reinvent the wheel when trying to create someting cool from scratch. However, I wanted to try something new this year because it’s a New Year, New Me. So I decided to find another way of getting my creative juices flowing for my applications.

The Internet is Your Oyster

Data is everything and it can be very hard trying to bring a project to life when you have none available to play and manipulate. However, there are public datasets that are available for use that you can easily throw into any of your project so that you can have fun with

There are thousands upon thousands of datasets available of the internet for you to mess around with.

Love food? Find a public dataset on the food consumption of Americans and year create a fitness app that recommends healthy food choices!

Love astrology? Find a dataset that shows information on the solar system and try and create an app that predicts when the next solar eclipse will come !

There are professionals out there who have done the hard work of researching and experimenting to get this data, so you might as well use it and have fun with it!

Most programming languages have a built in CSV parser extension which can allow you to easily access the data and give you the opportunity to manipulate it in the way you want. Public data can have thousands of rows of data, which can be a perfect way for you to learn how to visualize data on a view using D3.JS , or use a machine learning framework like Sci Kit Learn to learn how to run regression test.

Take Away

The internet is your oyster and I just wanted to write a quick post so that you can hop back into your code and get a project up and running. Below I provided some quick links so that you can get started on a project of your liking.

FBI Crime Data Set

Food Atlas Dataset

Police Shooting Dataset

Country Canonical Dataset