Ask HN: How do you come up with interesting side-project ideas?

4 points·kernel-dump··6 comments

I’ve tried looking at pain-points in my day-to-day routine or interactions with coworkers & friends, but for the most part I can’t identify any problems and feel kind of like I have a mental block. How do you come up with interesting side-project ideas whether for-profit or fun?

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Step away from software development long enough to learn something else.

Seriously. A lot of the software developers I have known are one trick ponys --- software is all they do. It's all they know and the only thing they ever want to do.

You can't see the forest if you only focus on the tree in front of you.

Find a hobby. There's usually unsolved problems or pain points to automate.

I personally find that many of my ideas have similar themes.

A great mechanical way to build a repertoire of ideas is to pick a big theme and start crossing it with different concepts and see what you come up with. Thinking of how things could work rather than how they won’t also helps!

That said, I’ve got a newsletter just for this[0].

[0]: https://unvalidatedideas.com

I was working in other field where I was filling the niche with my skills. To this day I am seeing value from that time, and problems that need to be solved but nobody really knows how.

Go and work in industry where software is not in the centre of solved problems. You will know if you are in such industry when your local branch will not have software skills, and all software is built elsewhere in the world.

Projects are all about solving a problem that either you have or people close to you have.

If you don't know what problems others are having, scratch your own itch.

What is your dev focus, front-end, backend, ios, etc?

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