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Discussion on: How to come up with new projects and their names

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JasperHorn • Edited

New projects

  • My most recently started project was inspired by a tweet of a project someone linked me to. I thought "well, that's really cool and with limited effort I can make this sort of similar thing that's not as cool but still pretty cool and it might actually be useful once it's done"

  • My second most recent project is a really ambitious project that started as an offshoot of something I had been thinking about for a while ("well, if I want to do that, it would be good to also have this") and then grew from there

  • Another project was simply me thinking of what I could make to get into this programming language I had no experience with, so I came up with a game to build

Algorithms

I don't work from algorithms. I work from an idea of the functional requirements of what I want to build. Writing the code I need to make that work gets the algorithms automatically.

Names

  • My most recent project doesn't have a name that I need to broadcast, so it's a pretty mechanical description of what the project is

  • My second most recent project has a name that I brainstormed, at one point I even had some people help with this. I described the feeling, length and other properties of the name I wanted (including an available domain name) and wrote down any idea I came up with. I used thesaurus and word association sites.

  • Another project has a name that is a careful mashup of two obscure pop culture references