As developers, we always want to try out new technologies. Unfortunately, most of the time we work on existing projects with little flexibility. Side project is a great way to learn and grow professionally. But one question remains...
Where do you get ideas for your next side project?
I have a very structured way of learning new languages, I code a semi-advanced system. The same system over and over again. It's a World of Warcraft community site. The requirements usually look like this:
The important thing is to build everything from scratch and with an architecture that makes sense for the language. It works great for me because I know the ins and outs of building such a system and it is quite fun to see where programming language x outperforms language y and so on. And it is easier to re-wire your brain if what you are building is something you are familiar with.
Wow! This sounds like a lot of work but very interesting
It is, but a lot of work is usually required to get to a comfortable level in any language :)
I've always loved the line from Robots movie, "See a need, fill a need". So you can start by trying to solve a problem that you yourself face.
In the past, I've also arranged for meetings with my clients and asked them what are their pain-points in their day to day work. Perhaps they work a lot in tedious spreadsheets which could be automated or made easier through building a simple app.
Love the phrase! I used to follow this moto as well but sometimes I really want to play with new tech but I'm not aware of any needs.
Then you might want to have a browse around on /r/AppIdeas <-- heaps of cool app ideas that you can get some inspiration from :)
Oh my. Everywhere. It's the time I don't find.
From every problem that you encounter as a user (an app that does X or Y) or a developer (a lib to simplify recurring tasks) to abstract things that help you understand concepts (oh let's create a compression algorithm).
Free idea: an app to copy/paste anything securely from a computer to another.
I once developed something similar but less secure.
I called it Firepaste, you could copy-paste from your computer to mobile or vice-versa.
I get them from things around me. I'm currently building a side-project I have had in my head for years. I already have another planned. The second is an internal tool I wish I had at my last place of work.
But most importantly, it is seeing a need and filling it
Most of the time, ideas just pop up in my head when there are problems that I can see which can be solved by automation.
For example, in my experience at school, we wait for almost 3-5 hours just to get our college fees so I developed a student fee management system.
My other source of idea is freelance websites. There's a lot of posts there asking for developers to build something for them. It's a good place of inspiration for side projects since projects there are connected to the industry/market.
Free website templates or software ui designs was also one of my sources of side project ideas. In my last project, I saw a design for a recruitment website at Facebook so I downloaded a template for it. Now to make the side project more inspiring to develop, I thought of the features of the framework that I used (which is django) which I have no experience of implementing it.
I personally like to use producthunt.com/ to keep myself updated on what other developers are working on, eventually I try to connect the dots and formulate a new idea based on what I have seen on producthunt and the requirements from my local surroundings.
This is a nice idea! Haven't thought about Product Hunt as a platform to get ideas from...