Hey, I just finished my first year of CS (been programming since before then). I want to start building actual projects (I have an idea for a Spotify voting thingy), but I'm struggling to actually begin without following a tutorial. Any suggestions?

There is nothing wrong with that approach. Sooner or later you start developing your own style and patterns.

Consider the following, when I was learning django it was common to just write functions inside our views.py files. Later on some tutorials or docs would introduce class based views. Eventually I would require docs on a particular concept and even if the tutorial had funcion based views but I already had a class based approach in my app I would make the required adjustments. The same can be said for the way in which we would do configs or folder structures.

Its a constan learning process. Never shy away from the ideas and approaches of others since computer science and software engineering is advanced by standing in the shoulders of giants.

My 2 cent: start with the computer off. Think about the WHAT, not the HOW. Then get pen and paper, and draw some kind of architecture, top-down. Check whether things would work out. Then think about failure scenarios. The implementation can be top-down or bottom-up, both can work once you already have the big picture.

Otherwise, your project starts out nice, but may end up as "grown system", i.e. an unmaintainable mess.

Oh, and take care to sanitise/validate any external input. Big source of security issues and crashes. Treat any input as malicious.

If you want to rely on a really comprehensive course of your demand, I can only recommend you the platform Udemy.

Addition: It guides you through the routine of setting up projects in every way, shape or form. It is really worth it.

Why Spotify? Use Airsonic :)

@D3add3d First thing to pop in my head. I'll have to check out airsonic :)

@F9lke I'll look into Udemy more. I've thought about it before but never gotten around to it. Thanks!

@Fast-Nop Pen and paper it is! Thanks :)

@fuck2code I'm able to find ideas, but I'm just struggling to get started actually making it.

@AleCx04 That's a great way to look at it. Thanks!

Hey dude, fellow "just finished first year" comp sci here.
Starting is actually the easy part. Keeping the motivation going is the hard part.

@LastDigitOfPi oh boy... I picked the name from a shortened version of my Reddit username