Ask HN: Good way to come to with a realistic weekend project?
I normally have a few ideas on the boil but I'm struggling for something right now: I was a victim of a violent assault earlier in the week, I am not in a state to go out and I'm struggling to think of something to occupy me (and take my mind off what happened!) that's not too vast/daunting but is also worth spending a bit of time on.
Usually I'm pretty creative / imaginative but I suspect the shock has made those aspects take a back seat... The only things that spring to mind are over ambitious for the timeframe. It doesn't strictly need to be a one-weekend only thing but I would like to get some sense of good progress, hence my desire to ponder a manageable scale project.
I'm a fairly all rounder tech, mainly using Python, modest JS, various AI tools.
I suppose if I can find a problem that resonates I'd figure out something from there, but like I say, the creativity isn't flowing!
Previous side projects I've done of this sort of scale include:
- personal doc/paper store/exploration tool with automated tagging and similar doc suggestion
- TTS heteronym prediction (to say ambiguous text in the expected way)
- a chess match viewer for PGN files in the browser
- various simple chatbots (pre-genAI and post) most recently a nice PowerPoint creator
I suppose one alternative is to try building something inspired by a tutorial/cloning an existing tool for learning purposes - that may fit better because there's a bit of direction already baked in, but ideally I'd find a new project.
Any suggestions?