2–3 weeks
Part 3 — Build Real Products
Ship 2-3 complete products. This is your portfolio.
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2–3 weeks0/4 topics done0/13 tasks done
Topics
What to learn
- Find a community of people (Reddit, Discord, Slack, Twitter)
- Find what they complain about doing manually and repeatedly
- Check if it's a text-in / text-out problem (most are)
- Build the minimum version in 3-4 days
- Rule: if you can't describe the target user in one sentence, the niche is too broad
- High-signal niches for MERN devs: code review & PR summaries (you understand code)
- High-signal niches for MERN devs: API documentation generator (paste code → get docs)
- High-signal niches for MERN devs: database query explainer (paste SQL/MongoDB → plain English)
- High-signal niches for MERN devs: technical job description writer (paste requirements → write JD)
What to learn
- Pattern A — Single-prompt tool: user inputs text → AI output (1-2 days)
- Pattern B — Conversational agent: multi-turn chat with specialised system prompt (3-5 days)
- Pattern C — AI + external data (RAG basics): AI answers grounded in your data (5-7 days)
- For your portfolio: build one of each — one A, one B, one C
What to learn
- Schema design: { userId, messages: [{role, content, createdAt}], createdAt }
- Loading conversation history and passing it back to the API on each request
- Conversation list sidebar — load all conversations for a user
- Auto-titling conversations (AI generates a 5-word title from the first message)
- Token limits — truncate or summarise older messages when approaching context limit
What to learn
- File uploads in Next.js — FormData on client, request.formData() on server
- Storing files — Vercel Blob or AWS S3 (Vercel Blob is simpler to start)
- Extracting text from PDFs — pdf-parse npm package
- Sending document text to the AI — paste into user message or system prompt
- Chunking large documents — keyword search for starters, vector search later
Assignment
Assignment
Assignment 3 — Full Product (Pattern B or C)
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No employer or customer cares what you know. They care what you've shipped.
Build Requirements
Acceptance Criteria
Notes
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