Problems are better than ideas

Why am I writing this article

This is my journey to becoming a software developer, and so far it’s taken a long time for me! I know, you’re probably thinking “don’t be too hard on yourself!”, but hold on! I’m just trying to be realistic with myself to find why this journey that started around 2012 it's still going... and the problem was this: I got this romantic dream of coming up with a millionaire app idea that would take me to success and also to land a awesome job down the line. But the reality is that I’m not really good at ideas, specially innovative ideas; and these are really hard to come by, even for people that have made viral apps.

Then I see websites with big lists of app ideas, but I always think: "...those are not for me,, I need to be interested in the software I'm building. And also there needs to be a purpose, even if it is just practice"

What’s wrong with ideas?

Recently I had a discovery that has given me a lot more hope and a more attainable goal than just coming up with innovative ideas for apps. I realized that I have the knowledge and skill to execute programming tasks once my objectives are defined, something I don’t have when looking for my killer idea. So it's not that ideas are bad, but problems are a faster way to finding your ideas.

Problems is the way to go!

So instead of saying why Ideas are bad, let me explain why problems are better. Well, as you may know, problems have the following characteristics:

• Easier to find than ideas, they are everywhere!
• Anyone is willing to share their problems and/or frustrations. For ideas, people are a bit more protective of them

Applying this...

There are several ways I am applying this new approach. As an example, I'm contributing to the Protege.dev project, this is helping me by honing my software skills, experience how it is to contribute to a big source code, and all this while helping the Protege team! And the best of all this: problems (issues) are already there, I don't need to find them!

Also, at my current job I'm also in the constant look out for problems, so I can bring value to the company by automating steps and trying to make some processes more efficient!

And you? Do you prefer ideas or problems?

Cover Photo by Timothy Perry on Unsplash