A one-week challenge: build, deploy and share a small personal expense tracker with accounts, a database and a monthly chart.
Build a dashboard that shows any developer’s public GitHub activity at a glance, and learn to work with a real public API, its rate limits and its data.
This challenge is about finishing. In seven days you build a small but complete full-stack app: people sign up, record expenses, put them in categories and see where their money went each month. It’s deliberately ordinary, so the effort goes into doing every layer properly (data model, API, interface, deployment) rather than into inventing features.
At the end you have something a recruiter or a client can open and use, a repository that shows how you work, and a build log of the week.
Many developers have a folder of unfinished projects. Tutorials teach one layer at a time, and personal projects grow until they stall. What many junior portfolios lack is evidence of having taken one idea all the way: designed it, built the backend and the frontend, deployed it and fixed what broke.
An expense tracker is also genuinely useful: plenty of people track spending in a spreadsheet they’ve stopped opening.
A web app with sign-in, a form to add an expense (amount, date, category, note), a list you can filter by month and category, and a simple chart of spending per category. Each person sees only their own data.
The week is planned day by day (see the roadmap), with one firm rule: the app is online by day 3 and stays online, so every later change ships. Use an AI coding assistant to move faster, and note in your build log where it helped and where you had to correct it.
Suggestions, not requirements: use what you know and what fits the problem.
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Spend a few days on these before you spend weeks on code.
Build an extension that saves a job posting in one click and keeps every application, its status and the next step in one list, then use it in your own job search.
Check a handful of websites and APIs every few minutes and get one clear alert when something goes down, built for indie developers who don’t need an enterprise tool.
