DEV Community

Cover image for What are some side project suggestions?
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on

What are some side project suggestions?

So let's say you have ideas, but don't have the time or energy to see them through, I'm sure there are a lot of folks in the opposite camp!

They could be for portfolio, free open source, or business ideas.

Don't be shy, drop some thoughts.

Top comments (52)

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Here's an evergreen project:

Highly specialized search engine/filterable directory. Something that could be more valuable than Google in one specific category. Ideally one that doesn't have a lot of existing commercial appeal. So, for example, there are a lot of search engines for real estate listingsโ€” because there is obvious money in that. But there are probably fewer search engines for, say, Abbot and Costello movies.

Pick a super niche hobby or passion you are interested in and combine it with your coding skills to come up with something super neat to a small group of people. As a Simpsons fan, frinkiac comes to mind as a great example.

This is the kind of project which is hard for "the big guy" to compete directly, even if it's Google, just because specialization affords opportunity to perfect certain nuances.

It's nice to have projects which don't require "initial users" to be worthwhile. This is the kind of thing where the information is already out there, but it's up to you to figure out how to structure the information in a way that makes this tool uniquely valuable.

If this seems like highly specific advice, I'll say that I already built something like this for comic book characters. I essentially took information available in existing databases and presented it in a way that was delightful and approachable. The UX was better than the old sites I found the info on. I had real daily visitors and people liked it. I was working on this around the same time I was hacking away on DEV, so DEV kind of took over and I let the other thing die.

Happy coding โค๏ธ

Collapse
 
richytong profile image
Richard Tong

I remember doing a search engine for youtube video metadata as a takehome project once. That project was perhaps my first exposure to inverted indexes, and made me a believer in project-based learning. Turns out inverted indexes are like real indexes but for words; you'll develop super human intuition on database indexes by doing a project like this. Also I found the project, if you're curious

github.com/richytong/yvmt

Collapse
 
razbakov profile image
Aleksey Razbakov

That's exactly what I thought, when I was creating search engine for dance events! I noticed that I could analyze descriptions for keywords and add some meta information for google and build some useful filters on top. I am planning to do same thing for dance videos, meanwhile trying to find developers to form an outsource community for dancers.

Collapse
 
thompcd profile image
Corey Thompson

Thatโ€™s a fantastic piece of advice! I instantly had a light bulb. We order hardware at work from a Siemens, a very very large industrial company. They sell so many different things to so many different types of customers, the user experience isnโ€™t even a consideration. Also, their primary language is German and things get lost in translation often for us. I call it a bit of a miracle that the information is even there - but itโ€™s not for the faint of heart. People at my work come to me any time they need a data sheet from them, typically a few times a week. I may explore building something like that for the types of hardware we use. Iโ€™ve had some new stacks Iโ€™ve been itching to try out. :)

Collapse
 
wolfhoundjesse profile image
Jesse M. Holmes

I've always wanted to learn more about any given culture by exploring the lyrics of their mainstream/non-mainstream bands. Just sayin', if Bangladesh, Belize, or Brazil has a Mandolin Orange dropping tracks about something as important/complicated as immigration reform or the birth of a nation, I'd want to learn about it.

Collapse
 
thefern profile image
Fernando B ๐Ÿš€

This is a short list of some of my ideas:

  • VR App for data analysis like the explosion on Iron Man 3
  • Smart landscape lighting
  • AR driving assistance
  • Twitter like for devs to post code, not pics of code
  • Puzzle like game based on Apollo 13 re entry power on sequence
  • Dotfiles management github.com/kodaman2/dotzilla
  • YouTube comments app with translation features
Collapse
 
iam_timsmith profile image
Tim Smith

Your twitter for devs already exists! dwitter.net/

Collapse
 
hemant profile image
Hemant Joshi

I don't know about a good side project but something that I am working on is the
Dev.To Self Blog...

About It

It is the simple react app, which will let user insert there user name and it will generate a copy of your blogs and hosted on Netlify

Something you can add to your Portfolio, half of the work is done by me
Look here: hemant-blog.netlify.app/

I will call it poor CSS Application...
I am unable to complete the CSS, because of less time and other works and poor CSS๐Ÿ˜ผ,

If someone would live to contribute by making a Interactive Desgin, can contribute to my github. Would really Appreciate the help๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ™;

The App is built In React with React-Redux;

If anyone like to contribute, please contact ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ™,

And I belive this is a good project idea, a dev.to static blog generator with Netlify hosting.

Thank you๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ˜ผโค๏ธ;

Please contribute with your Awesome CSSโค๏ธโค๏ธ

Collapse
 
elseraa profile image
Sera

Hi! I would like to help :)
DM on Twitter ir you like @elseraa

Collapse
 
iamschulz profile image
Daniel Schulz

I usually go for "Solve your own problems".
What's your hobby? Maybe photography? Try writing a light meter with the sensors API.
Or mountain biking? Track and visualize the height profile of your route.
Movie buff? I'd love to have an X Ray app. Snap a picture of the screen and get the actors' name and bio.

Collapse
 
thecodepixi profile image
Emmy | Pixi

I was actually just discussing with someone building an activism app. With the everything about the world right now it's hard to keep track of active initiatives and petitions and protests and rallies and all of the amazing educational content being produced and conversations happening. I thought it could be cool to utilize some government API and maybe some web-scraping to put together an app to organize local info. So you can plug in your location and get all the contact info for your local representatives, petitions appropriate for your location, and information about protests and events in your area, with links to relevant resources like articles about each situation or movement.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yup, this is a really good idea. I think what's critical with stuff like this is to avoid the urge to have to "capture the moment" and build for the long haul, because it can take a while to get software working just right, or hitting enough adoption to make ongoing work worthwhile. If you try to rush things, it's easy for those involved to be demotivated.

Collapse
 
easrng profile image
easrng

I love this idea!

Collapse
 
muhimen123 profile image
Muhimen

As a non web dev I like to make various API wrappers with Go and Python. (I have one for DEV too ๐Ÿ˜Ž).

Collapse
 
samjarman profile image
Sam Jarman ๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿผโ€๐Ÿ’ป

I wrote up how to find ideas a while back :) dev.to/samjarman/finding-ideas-for...

Collapse
 
adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€ • Edited

An auto poster for dev to post changelists on open source projects, I would be very interested in that. Any takers?

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This is a great idea. Would this be posted as a sort of "bot" account? I'm interested in making this an officially allowed concept, but where the accounts are explicitly labelled as such.

The way the feed works, this would mostly show up for folks who follow these accounts, so it's not like bots would gum up other folks' feeds.

Collapse
 
adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€ • Edited

Well I think you might have filled in the detail. I know that didi would certainly benifit from didi bot. Taking in commits and somehow releasing the highlights based on commit rules I suspect that sort of thing, maybe some new account options. Absolutely a whitelist bot account would work. Would I need to setup an organization?

Thread Thread
 
tylerauerbeck profile image
Tyler Auerbeck

I really like this idea as well. I had done some work on a github action awhile back for automatic posting from a markdown file to dev.to. (github.com/tylerauerbeck/publish-t...) that you might even be able to lean on . I realize this is a bit github specific at this point, but in the end itโ€™s just a python script so you can just pull that and plug it into source control of choice. So from that point itโ€™s just publish changelog as .md and then push to the DEV.to API.

Thread Thread
 
adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

Fantastic this should give someone a leg up, I wish I had time to do it.

Collapse
 
waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Could specific tags be targeted towards bots? or require -bot in the tag name.

Ex. #github-bot

Collapse
 
dansilcox profile image
Dan Silcox

Shopping scheduler that reminds me, say every week, to get bread and milk, every month to get toothpaste, etc and then learns by when/what I actually buy (scan receipts or something) what my actual schedule is for these items and remind me when it thinks Iโ€™m running low (or better still, hook it up to an actual supermarket API and order in the shopping at the right time, if thatโ€™s a thing!!)

Collapse
 
blestab profile image
blestab • Edited

Great idea, it is definitely a thing.

I'm thinking for me it will be for my prepaid electricity, I recently moved to a house where the electricity is prepaid and still trying to figure out my average usage so that I know when to reorder before I run out.

Collapse
 
dansilcox profile image
Dan Silcox

Sounds great! Keeping the scope more focussed will likely result in a better product too :) If you build this I'd love to see it :)

Collapse
 
atulcodex profile image
๐Ÿšฉ Atul Prajapati ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

Dev post scheduler ๐Ÿ’›

Collapse
 
waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Dev auto updater. If a post was published from RSS then updated later it updates on dev.

Collapse
 
atulcodex profile image
๐Ÿšฉ Atul Prajapati ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

Oh thanks, nice trick ๐Ÿค˜๐Ÿ‘