Learning map · Track 17 · advanced
Applied Projects and Capstones
Knowing what a loop, a dictionary or a class does is not the same as being able to build a program someone else will rely on. This track closes that gap. Each lesson is one substantial project — a shop receipt generator, a gradebook, an inventory system, an expense tracker, a quiz engine, a log analyzer, a data-cleaning pipeline, a pandas sales dashboard, a tested library system, an async job scheduler, a monthly reporting workflow — written from a realistic requirements brief with a user story, sample data and acceptance criteria. You build each one in five to seven milestones. Every milestone starts from the previous milestone's working code, adds one requirement, and is checked automatically: the new behaviour is tested, and so is everything you built before, so you learn to extend a program without breaking it.
The projects get steadily more demanding. The first two need only the basics (variables, conditions, loops, functions, lists and dictionaries); later ones bring in classes, files and JSON, regular expressions, CSV cleaning, pandas and matplotlib, pytest-style testing and asyncio. Along the way you practise the habits that matter on real work: reading requirements carefully, deciding which functions and classes a program needs before writing them, separating calculation from input and output, validating data and failing with clear errors, and producing reports people can read. The track ends with a seven-milestone capstone that takes several messy datasets all the way to a tested, charted, written business report.
By the end of this track you can
- Turn a requirements brief into a design of functions and classes, then build it incrementally without breaking earlier behaviour
- Model real-world records with dictionaries, lists and classes, validating input and raising clear, specific errors
- Load, clean, persist and report on data from text, CSV and JSON files, producing aligned text and Markdown reports
- Analyse and chart data end to end with pandas and matplotlib, and check charts by their properties rather than by eye
- Write automated tests that catch real bugs, and use asyncio to run timed, retried jobs concurrently with deterministic results
- Deliver a complete capstone: ingest, clean, model, analyse, chart, test and report on a multi-file business dataset
Lessons
- 1Project: shop receipt generatorBuild a till program for a small shop that reads items, applies multi-buy and order discounts, adds VAT, takes payment and prints an aligned receipt.75 min · 6 exFree
- 2Project: gradebook analyzerBuild a gradebook for a teacher: averages, letter grades, class statistics, a fair ranking with ties, missing work and an aligned report, one function at a time.80 min · 6 exMembers
- 3Project: inventory managerModel a shop's stock with classes: validated products, an inventory with stock movements, a custom exception for overselling, an audit history, low-stock alerts, valuation and a stock report.95 min · 6 exMembers
- 4Project: personal expense trackerBuild an expense tracker that loads and saves expenses as JSON, validates new entries, totals spending by category and month, and warns when a budget is close to running out.90 min · 6 exMembers
- 5Project: quiz engineBuild a quiz engine that loads and validates questions from JSON, understands untidy typed answers, gives feedback, scores against a pass mark and runs a retry round.90 min · 6 exMembers
- 6Project: web server log analyzerParse a web shop's access log with a regular expression, then count status codes, rank endpoints, detect bursts of server errors and write an incident report.90 min · 6 exMembers
- 7Project: customer data-cleaning pipelineTurn a messy customer sign-up export into a clean, de-duplicated CSV and an error report, one tested cleaning function at a time.100 min · 6 exMembers
- 8Project: sales dashboard with pandas and matplotlibTurn a year of order lines into a sales dashboard: monthly revenue, top products, regional comparison, two charts and a KPI summary, all built as small tested functions.100 min · 6 exMembers
- 9Project: community library system with testsModel a lending library with Book, Member and Library classes, enforce loan rules and late fees with clear errors, then write tests that prove the rules hold.100 min · 6 exMembers
- 10Project: async job schedulerBuild a scheduler that runs background jobs concurrently with asyncio: priorities, a concurrency limit, timeouts, retries and a deterministic run report.95 min · 6 exMembers
- 11Project: monthly report automationAutomate a month-end chore: sort branch exports into folders, combine and validate them, and produce a Markdown sales report with a log of every step.100 min · 6 exMembers
- 12Capstone: end-to-end business analyticsTake three messy datasets from a coffee roaster all the way to a tested, charted Markdown sales report: ingest, clean, model with classes, analyse with pandas, chart, test and report.180 min · 7 exMembers