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Discussion on: How do you come up with new side projects?

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Lorraine Lee

It's a cliche, but for me it really is, often enough, just scratching an itch.

I wrote Ettal for balancing my checking account (and doing a few other personal finance things) because, while I love me some GnuCash, I find their user interface cumbersome and atrocious.

I wrote Prostetnic Highligher (deprecated in favor of Persistent Highlighter) because my beloved needed a web page highlighter, was an avid Yooper user, but Firefox 4.0 broke Yooper, and the other browser extensions for highlighting were too dumbed down. Couple years later Firefox broke Prostetnic so I wrote Persistent Highlighter. The original Prostetnic Highlighter was my first exposure to Javascript.

Back in 2011, I wrote AIS (Agnostic Ideology Sorter) because I was fascinated by "put you in an ideological bin based on your survey responses" websites such as Political Compass, but I was always troubled by the fact that which questions got counted toward which "axis" seemed to rest on a priori assumptions, so I wrote a politics questionnaire with a backend that does pattern recognition on the survey data. This project was my first exposure to PHP (and my first attempt at writing a website backend). My hosting provider was a small pop-and-pop operation that eventually folded, but Wayback has a few receipts, such as this.

I guess the common denominator is, I was using some software tool or website for some purpose, and it left me wanting more, maybe an additional feature, or a less cumbersome user interface.