I'm 16 and Built 700 Coding Projects for Fun – Here's What I Learned

Hi HN,

I'm Raj Guru Yadav, a 16-year-old self-taught developer from India. Over the last 3 years, I’ve built 700+ coding projects, ranging from simple JS games and UI dashboards to AI tools, voice-based bots, and even a Bhagavad Gita Q&A system trained on all 700 shlokas.

I didn’t have a roadmap. I just started building whatever I was curious about — sometimes finishing a project in a day, sometimes iterating 10 times over one idea.

A few highlights:

Built a playable Ludo board with HTML/CSS/JS

Made a SmartBot that solves math & answers via voice

Created an eBook dashboard with neon UI and local auth

Trained an AI on the Bhagavad Gita in Hindi & English

Built class-wise student managers with localStorage + chart support

All hosted across GitHub, CodePen, and a few personal experiments.

What I Learned: You don’t need a “perfect” idea to start. Start anyway.

Repetition is powerful. The 12th calculator you build will be better than the first 5 combined.

Document and share. It builds confidence and community.

Projects are the best way to learn real-world development — better than just tutorials.

I’m sharing this not to brag, but to say: If you’re young (or just starting out), don’t overthink. Just build. The journey teaches you more than the outcome.

Happy to answer any questions or share code snippets if you’re curious!

Raj https://github.com/Rajyadav81