Many times, a good first programming project for a beginner to really get their hands dirty is a basic Todo list. I have made quite a few of these in various programming languages at this point, but the first one I made was a simple NodeJS CLI todo app. Crude and practically indecipherable to me now, this first attempt at making such a basic application got me to understand the basics of CRUD, and it wasn't long before I began to see these basic data operations everywhere.