
Ask HN: How to pick a side project? - Raed667
How do you choose a theme or an issue to solve? Is it passion, or market opportunity?<p>I enjoy coding small projects that solve small problems that I come across. My Github is full of those, but I never seem to commit to one idea as I get bored or it reaches its limits.<p>How do you decide what to work on ?
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mbrock
One of the wonderful things about the side project is that it can be
personally relevant for you and/or friends and family.

Just having someone else use the thing brings it into the realm of reality way
more than any technical factor.

I play music with some friends, mostly covers, and in all my time playing like
this, there's been this constant band confusion that you might relate to if
you've been in a hobby band:

What key do we play this in again? How long is the outro? Oh, you play the
last chord in the verse for _two_ bars? Did anyone bring the chord sheet for
that new song? Ugh, the 3G in the rehearsal space is so awful, and this chord
site is so slow! Oh, did you guys learn the "acoustic" tab with the different
chords? Etc etc.

So I started working on a little web app for sharing chord sheets with
bandmates. Sure, we could just use a Dropbox with text files... But since it's
a side project for fun, why not add some features?

Now it can parse a simple chord sheet format that represents timing, which
most chord sheets neglect—so we can see that the last chord in the verse is
two bars, and that the outro is eight bars... I learned about Service Workers
in order to make it work perfectly offline... I used CouchDB/PouchDB for
storage, which enables really nice real-time sync, and also works great
offline... I learned how to make a nice print stylesheet...

And there are more coders in the band! So one guy implemented client-side
chord transposing and changed my parser regexps into a proper grammar. An old
musician/coder friend from my home town heard about it and is interested in
participating, too...

And then I thought, hey, there's the new Web Audio APIs... so now it can also
play songs with synthesized chords! And then I noticed that Chrome's latest
release can actually compress and encode recorded audio, so now I'm imagining
that you could record tracks in there, and share them, and do collaborative
multitracking...

It's just growing like a living system, because it connects with something I
and other people have actual desire for—and that's really fun!

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ninjavis
Find something that frustrates people and build something that solves it for
them.

Innovate on something that people do every single day. For example, people
communicate every day, sleep, eat, exercise, work, entertain, use consumables.
Make a list of literally anything you can think of that people do every day,
and more than often ideas and issues to solve pop up.

LISTEN to people as they "wish upon things" every now and then. Ex. "I wish
someone would xyz.. ", "I wish there was a way to xyz...", "When will there be
xyz...". These types of comments are a goldmine for choosing a theme.

Hope I answered your question and that this helps, my friend!

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tmaly
Go see what other people are doing. There are several podcasts out there where
people talk about side projects and the degree of success they are having with
them.

~~~
iSloth
Any recomendations of podcasts?

~~~
tmaly
side hustle nation is what I have been listening to lately.

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partisan
What's important to you? Do you want to learn or do you want to make money? Or
some mixture of the two? Is it about the journey or the destination? I've
found that the journey tends to be most important for me so I temper my
aspirations with the knowledge that I will likely not continue on after I've
answered whatever vital question was driving the effort. It keeps me from
being disappointed with the result of not finishing.

~~~
Raed667
Ideally it would be a bit of both, but it tends to be more about something I
could learn outside my daily routine.

~~~
partisan
So don't be so hard on yourself when you don't finish. Finish something every
so often so that you don't feel like you can't, but allow yourself to explore
without always having delivering something complete. It's not work. If you
switch over to trying to generate revenue, well then at that point, hold
yourself to a different standard.

