I’m in a different mindset these days.
For years, I—like many developers—fell into the trap of starting projects that were technically impressive...
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I sometimes wonder about that too! When it comes to open-source libraries, I used to contribute to Stylelint and I remember it very positively - the maintainers were helpful and the issues were well described.
I still can't find myself a proper way to get open source projects I can start contributing to.
Tried checking details on Stylelint, but I feel it's too complex for me to use as a start for now.
What friendly meaningful JavaScript open source project can you recommend for me, please?
Why do projects have to be useful? Build because you enjoy doing it. Build anything you like.
Good question, and I'd answer by saying I'm describing "usefulness" in very broad terms. Personal satisfaction is absolutely a use.
Life's a journey not a destination, so the process of building anything can be worth the whole thing. For me, though, I sometimes make dumb decisions upfront about what I want to commit to that I lose satisfaction when reality hits, and if I'm a bit thoughtful upfront I can laser in on what's actually worth it. Sometimes you have to run with inspiration, but left without a code I sometimes go too far in that direction.
Good luck in your side project.
For me, it was always, whether i can learn something by doing it. Nowadays, it is switching to "if i can learn something" AND "if it could be useful to me or others". But still do not strictly apply the 2nd criteria.
Though currently I am building 2 side projects and i hope to fulfill the 2nd one as well...
One is a next+react project and other is react+vite.
free hosting, free-all, for now.
Oh except, for the second one i bought a domain name. But not active yet.
It’s so cool that you can easily turn your ideas into projects! My first priority in a project is that it’s fun for me. However, I tend to lose interest easily. So my second priority is feedback from users and readers. When I create something and share it on the DEV Community—and luckily get a good reaction—it motivates me to work on the next update. Thank you, DEV Community!😊
This looks great... And a lot like how I think about my own side projects too. The utility-to-maintenance ratio is definitely something to make projects by.
So true. I felt so drained in 2025, that it basically transformed me into a zombie, the one who just consumes and can't produce anything, nor having motivation or interest to do anything.
I got very excited creating with AI beginning 2025, got into sleepless nights for weeks building, but at some point it just drained my energy and I gave up on anything and entered some kind of depression state for months.
A friend of mine has a similar situation =) He is a programmer and is passionate about snooker. This game requires control and tracking of intermediate results, and keeping everything in spreadsheets is not very convenient. So he quickly put together a small web application as well: snooker-practice-routines.vercel.app. From what he told me, it runs on IndexedDB, but he does not have enough time to fully finish it 😊
No, I'm not in the market for a golf launch monitor :)
Jokes apart. This is a great example of a small project that does one thing well. Congratulations on getting this out in the world.
The "messy information problem" framing really resonates. I've been applying the same filter and landed on a nearly identical pattern — scattered public data that nobody has bothered to organize cleanly.
Parks across the US are a great example. NPS, state parks, county parks, BLM land — the data exists but it's fragmented across dozens of agencies with inconsistent formats. Someone looking for a park near them has to check 4-5 different sites. Built parklookup.com with the same philosophy: aggregate the chaos into one static-friendly interface, host it cheap, solve a real lookup problem today.
Your utility-to-maintenance ratio is the key insight. The projects that survive aren't the ambitious ones — they're the ones where the data is finite enough to be exhaustive, the hosting cost rounds to zero, and someone Googling the problem actually finds you useful. Choosy Golf nails all three.
The AI-assisted research workflow you described is underrated too. For any comparison/aggregation site, having AI help scrape and normalize data while you manually verify the edge cases is 10x faster than either approach alone.
I wonder if there's a third category between "don't build useless MVPs" and "only build useful things": building to learn and explore, even if the outcome is uncertain. Some of the best tools I've made started as "I wonder if I can..."
This is a great articulation of what “commit-worthy” actually looks like in practice.
Finite scope, immediate utility, and low overhead are incredibly strong filters.
They remove a huge amount of ambiguity before a project even starts.
I ran into a similar problem, but one step later in the process:
even with good criteria, projects would still linger without a clear moment to decide.
What helped me was adding explicit decision windows on top of criteria like yours —
deciding upfront when I’d reassess and what signals would justify going all-in
versus walking away.
That gray zone between “maybe” and “commit” was draining enough that I eventually
built a small offline app for myself (Finale — a decision framework)
just to time-box projects and force clear endings.
The important thing is to start doing it.