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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I have the problem that basically all my needs are already addressed by existing software.

I had that problem too. So then I started making things that I thought were humorous. -Very innapropriate flappy bird clone. -An app that makes a playlist out of a bands most recent setlist on google play. -An app that reads articles using tts and allows you to play/pause/save them. -An app that lets you tell people you are on the way (like yo but with location streaming)

Just think of something you think is funny or talk to your friends that are into tech either directly or tangentially. A lot of my ideas come from phone calls my Mutual Fund investing best friend.

This is actually true only to some degree. Of course, you can't create your own full-fledge game, but in terms of automation you can do a lot. You like to listen to certain radio, but it has shitty interface? Build site/app/etc to address it! Yes, it will be small and won't do anything else, but for you it will be helpful, so you will do it with passion.

The same applies for other "utility" stuff – you can create your own flashcards service, which will be super convenient exactly for you, and so forth. So, don't underestimate yourself – software often is good only to some use-cases, not for yours.

My usecases are typical enough that I don't encounter things that I could improve, or if I do I would have to replicate a lot of the stuff surrounding that particular minor annoyance. That would usually require man-years of work.

Excuses are the nails that build the bridge to failure.

I dunno, man, there's only so much tech can do. There's not much an app or CLI can do for the economy or civil rights legislature, for example, and those are the two biggest problems for me.

I don't find that to be true for me at all. Like the other poster said, there's endless possibilities for automation. I just don't have enough time to do all the weird projects I'd like to do, but I've got ideas for a bunch of things. At a minimum, there's plenty of places where there's some open-source software that does part of what I want, but I'd like to make changes to it. On top of that, there's a bunch of things I'd like to do that need a more serious project, and existing software that does something similar really sucks, or only works in Windows.

I see this with basically everything I use and look at in life: there's always something that can be done better (or better for me at least). Things I'd like to change on my car, things I'd like to change on my house, etc. The problem is lack of time, and too-high barriers to entry. For instance, my car's pretty new and there's some things I wish I could change on it which are really just software, but it's all closed-source and proprietary and completely inaccessible so it'd be a giant project to reverse-engineer it to make even a simple modification. But with open-source software running on a PC, this is a golden opportunity to be able to jump in and learn how others did something, and be able to make your own changes with a relative minimum amount of time getting set up (i.e., not needing to do reverse-engineering). Even writing your own applications is pretty easy these days with Free/open-source compilers, toolkits, libraries, etc. You can do all kinds of things with Python, for instance, and all the tools you need (including the OS) are freely downloadable.

I've gotten a lot of my best ideas from my friends. Right now my polo league wants some software for scoring tournaments. A few years ago, the local drift racing organization wanted some similar software to replace their excel spreadsheets for scoring laps. Someone wanted an app for calculating variables related to suspension springs. There are plenty of of software solutions for scheduling volunteers, hairdressers, acupuncturists, or receptionists, but even so, a lot of the ones in current use are shite. A boring problem becomes more interesting when you're doing it for someone you love.

I have the problem. Sometimes. And sometimes not.

The other day, I was making a website as part of my project. I needed a static site generator. As I looked over the options, I became increasingly of the opinion that they all sucked, and were all far to complicated, especially given my needs (simple blog site: Put together some HTML fragments with templates, and generate an index from another template). I could write something better than this. In fact, I was about to visualize a design when I realized that I had six projects going and really did not need another one.

I had a problem a bit like this a while back: I had (and still have) a small side business, and needed a shopping cart for it. I looked around at open-source solutions like osCommerce and Magento and decided they all sucked, especially for my use-case (I have a small number of products for sale, each with a lot of documentation, instructions, illustrations, etc., not a giant retail site with hundreds or thousands of products with a minimal description for each). I tried, but these programs were all such huge monoliths that it was too impractical to strip them down to the minimalistic code I wanted to run, nor did I want to use a database (I run on a small, cheap, slow webserver and want to keep my page-load times decent). I ended up finding a somewhat broken but minimalistic shopping cart program in PHP, and learned enough PHP to fix it up and customize it for my site. That program is now abandonware, but my heavily modified version is working great on my site, and does just what I need: gives me a simple but functional shopping cart and is very fast, and if I need to make more changes is easy to modify because it's not a giant mess of tens of thousands of lines of code in hundreds of source files with zero comments (I'm looking at you, Magento...).

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