Do you guys have any suggestion on how to find interesting ideas for side projects? Should I go to meetups and talk to more people?
Would really appreciate your answers!
As far as finding an interesting problem to solve. PG explains in a follow-up essay, I think, that most people get used to suboptimal situations. We, as human, are very good as rationalizing painful situations, processes, etc, as normal and good. You need to take a step back when something is long, boring, repetitive or annoying. Is it really necessary? Couldn't it be automated? Question your assumptions :-)
What are the things in my company that suck to deal with? We sat down and listed out all the annoying things that we have to deal with on a day to day basis. Poorly run meetings, endless approvals on certain projects, an inflexible CMS...
Plenty of problems out there, just need to look.
One more approach: find a customer set you want to work with and grill them on their problems. What does a day in the life of X look like? What is the most painful thing about doing x? Why is that? What ways have you tried to solve that problem? Ideally x is a very boring industry or role.
But maybe you should find an open source project you like and see how you can start contributing in a meaningful way (meaningful to you).
Baring that, THINK SMALL. Think about one tiny thing to make, and then code the hell out of it:
- documentation - build process - tests - cross platform-ness - packaged for distribution (deb, Rpm, pip, npm, whatever)
I say all of this because a side project is often so much more than just the thing you want to code. Most of us devs would like to share our work, and the things listed above help other devs see that this project is serious and warrants our time / effort.
Think Uber for... (But seriously, don't do 'the Uber of [anything]'.
My latest side project I was thinking about a product I love and I thought about how I use Buffer for social media management. They have made my life, so much easier! From there I thought about if the concept could be applied to any other industry. I realized the messaging industry had nothing like it! Needless to say, I am not working on 'the Buffer of messaging', but that is where the idea spawned and I refined it from there.