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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Multi-Account Containers extension is looking for more contributors

https://lemm.ee/post/43431167

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/discussions/2672

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.

This consternation is definitely common. It’s hard to apply skills to something with no long term impact of benefit. I’ve improved my skills by finding stuff I can help on in the communities I participate in.

It’s natural to be overwhelmed, so deciding on a project does scope what you can learn, but a hard part is architecting the foundation of that project.

Introducing new features to an existing project is a great way to get your feet wet - it has multiple benefits, for one of you do take a position as a developer in the future, you likely won’t be architecting anything initially, primarily improving on existing projects. So participating in OSS projects is a similar mechanism to that - you have to learn their codebase to a degree, you have to learn their style and requirements, etc.

Even if you don’t ultimately contribute, it’s still a learning experience.

You can’t. You either go into work and learn to solve complex problems or pivot to something else. For me it was the latter, I’m IT brainlet now, but every time I come back to brushing up on programming there’s like no middle ground with projects, I don’t have the time or really energy to commit to building a 3D video game engine in C or an OS, and learning pointer arithmetic for multiple iterators all just to make a palindrome checker CLI feels lame and building a clone of Spotify but in some new webdev thing or the week to some tutorial is hard to be excited about.

Leetcode is a great way to polish your skills. When I was your age, I read programming books and made projects I cared about, it’s turned out very well.

I’ve helped a few others learn programming, practice and working on any project at all always help more than anything.

It’s a lot of work. I’m in a similar boat. I’ve been self teaching myself how to program in various languages and working as a Fullstack developer at a very small startup.

While I’ve learned alot, there’s always more to learn and finding direction is a challenge you’ll hit many times over if you stick with it.

Right now I’m reviewing various Open Source Projects I could contribute to as I know ultimately this will make me a much better developer. There are so many CLI and web development tools I use that I’d like to expand on but will require a marginal jump in my skills. Here are a few examples:

• Add a feature to the rTorrent client that would allow it to torrent over i2p
• Expand the amount of tools available within the SolidJS framework ecosystem to be competitive with React’s ecosystem.
• Create a HTTP server in Rust that has feature parity with Golang’s Caddy
• Add a feature to AntennaPod akin to YouTube Sponsor block that would allow for user contributed timestamps to facilitate auto skipping of ad mentions in podcast episodes.

I also am slowly working out plans to learn enough about Rust and browsers to recreate the terminal based browser Links in Rust.

But these are all just me spitballing. In truth, my skills aren’t quite there yet and the amount of time to get there for each one of these is a lot. So I have to choose wisely and dive in deep for at least a year or more to make headway (most likely anyways). But this is the mindset I think might help you. Look into the software you use a lot or like the concept of. Figure out how you’d like to improve it or add to it. Reach out to the developers of said software however you can, either make your case for the improvements you want to make or just help out on something they want to do with the software. Learn, listen. Rinse and repeat.

Hope this helps a bit.

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.