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Comment by chrisa | Hacker News Reader

Two things I find very helpful:

1. Hang out online where people talk about new technologies. For me, that's HN, dev.to, and twitter (only works if you follow people doing cool things in tech)

2. Try out new technology by doing _small_, mostly pointless, but FUN little projects. That way, you don't have time to "get bored", because they're just little fun side projects! Also, you don't have to worry about them "scaling", etc - because you can just tell yourself that it's just a silly little project. But after several of these silly little projects - you'll be surprised at how much you've learned, and actually accomplished!

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This. I sometimes find it hard to find suitable side projects that are

- small enough that you don't lose interest on the last mile

- big enough that it gives you something at least mildly valueable

- easy to entry and easy to work on occasionally. That last point kept me away from some hardware projects because I felt I need to carry the hardware wherever I go, just to do some experiments on the go.

All at the same time.

Any strategies in finding ideas?

Have you tried making games? Can be as big or small as you want, can be as simple or complicated as you want, in the end you made something which didn't exist before and that is a satisfying feeling. It might not be a great career choice, but games have many of the most interesting problems in computer science.

Hm, I don't know that I have a formal process for finding good side projects, but here's something I've been doing recently that might work for you:

1. Find something you want to play around with; for me recently, that was React Hooks

2. Start a codesandbox (I guess that only works if you're doing web dev stuff though), and just start messing with the examples from the tutorials

3. I almost always find something I want to explore further during that step, so then I take it offline and start a larger project

So I guess my advice would be: start small; even smaller than you think you should start (i.e., don't come up with a whole project to do - just "mess around" with the tech/idea in some small way first).

Then eventually, you'll get ideas about what you can try out, and what you should break off into a bigger chunk and try as a larger (but still small!) side project

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