Ask HN: How to come up with sideproject ideas?
I have some time available, but no idea what to fiddle around with. What would be an interesting way to brainstorm little side project ideas to work on? What kind of questions can one ask himself?
This is my main pet idea, feel free to do it:
I am very interested in the idea of sites that provide cloud functionality (e.g. a budget app, a todo list, a calendar, a document editor etc.) but the user controls where and how the data is stored.
I was thinking of making an app that does a lot of those things (budget todo etc.), and you log in via Dropbox - USING THE CLIENT SIDE API. So there is no middleware server, just a static site and then Dropbox API connected via XHR requests.
The next step is to integrate 10 other Dropbox-like services, and eventually open it up to be extendable so anyone can bring their own service if they want full control over where there data is stored.
Then other people can write more apps for the eco system. Eventually you will be able to say "I want this mail client, and I want to store my data in Azure", or "I want this todo list, with my data stored on my server" and it will be super easy to do. And by easy I mean the app developers don't think about storage other than a call to .store(json), and the user doesn't need any technical knowledge to make their choices.
This is to bring the spirit of desktop apps to the web. Just because we use the web for convenience it doesn't mean we need to be tracked and have it in a nice schema with other people's data for spying on.
The gold plating is to integrate with some work that has been done recently on a document format for collaborative editing of documents. It was posted on HN a few weeks ago but I don't have the link to hand.
If someone ends up actually doing this: Feel free to reach out to me, I would put some of my free time into this. :)
One big plus is that if you can improve something small and make a website that people can find, you have tangibly made people's lives better in your community.
If you are familiar with arduino, 3d printers and stepper controller/driver here is a project that I have been thinking/dreaming for a while.
- An auto level grill based on the charcoal temperature
This will use the code of the Z axis of a 3d printer, the mechanical part will also be very similar to the Z axis (just in principle), instead of the 3d plate you will have your grill to put the meet and a couple of temperature sensors bellow the grill, based on the temp the controller will keep the grill at the right height from the charcoal, this way you will have your perfect grilling temperature all the time!
I have seen that the projects/ideas that I enjoy the most to work on are the ones that could solve an issue and/or make things easier and are based on my own experience/pain.
there's an idea
Actually, exactly this is a side project of mine, running at https://egghead.space ;)
However, as my side projects tend to go, it's not very polished - or finished even. I still think it's a good idea though and hope I will finish it some day...
Also, here's Ryan Hoover's (creator of ProductHunt) response to your question - https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-come-up-with-side-projec...
Here are a couple akk yourself questions:
"What things do I find frustrating that I know I could make a positive impact on?"
"What is my idea of a cool one-man moonshot concept that I could (probably) never realize but would be ultimately be fun to do?" (you probably will be surprised on how far you can get or what it leads to...)
"What's the scariest thing I could work on?"
To start with it's a mechanical exercise in transcription but you begin to learn more about the problem domain and get ideas for side avenues and questions to explore. And at the end of it all you've enriched an ecosystem and can give any improvements back to the original project.