
Ask HN: How do you come up with progressive project ideas? - kanso
I program inside and outside of work. As some of you, I absolutely love learning, creating, and problem solving. I am how ever at a point with my job where I no longer feeling as though I am growing. I feel static and I need more challenge.<p>My problem is that I am having a hard time come up with a meaningful project to take on. Are there any methods, or strategies to find an area no one has touched? I always see blog posts, or github repositories of awesome projects other developers create &#x2F; contribute to.<p>How do I find something like that? Something that is relevant &amp; beneficial to my growth as a programmer?
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eswat
Whatever you come up with will be a remix of things you've experienced in
life, from actual things you've done to conversations you've had. If you want
a breadth of ideas then having a breadth of experiences is one solution; talk
to different people, visit different places, read different books and even
change how you experience those (try an audiobook or speed reading if you’re
used to reading a book at a leisurely pace).

Once this starts collating in your head you can brainstorm ideas on your own
or in a group. One caveat is that ideas in this early stage should not be
filtered: think of something, write it down, repeat. I’ve seen far too many
brainstorm and public discussions drum up ho-hum solutions to problems because
taboos and political correctness got in the way of interesting ideas. Such
ideas may be stupid or even offensive but they can be a catalyst for much
better solutions.

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dnh44
Highly quality inputs are important. Books, films, YouTube, whatever. Go for
walks. Spend more time alone and day dream. I think day dreaming is important.
Try meditation, or consider smoking cannabis, but if you do do it alone.

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tmaly
I always look for something that requires too much time to do or something
that is very manual in nature. I ask myself how often I do this, and if it is
often enough, I consider it.

Even if you see something that looks like you are interested in building, they
could have solved it in a completely different manner than you would have.
There is still some merit in taking on the challenge yourself.

~~~
nekopa
Regarding your first point:

[https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

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taprun
Here's a challenge: discoverability. There are a lot of unknown but talented
people in crowded fields (fiction writing, software engineering, cooking).

Write some software to make them easily found that can't be taken over by
spammers and fakers.

It's a hard problem, but if you can solve it you will be a hero to many.

~~~
cableshaft
Anyone who can take this on in a better or with a different approach to what
already exists would be greatly appreciated to creators. I'm one, and I've
been frustrated with the state of many discovery engines out there.

I've been toying around with the idea of some sort of P2P discoverability
engine myself, but I don't really have the time or energy to really tackle it
myself.

Just improvements on a 'recommendation algorithm' isn't enough, to me. You
need to provide many, many vectors to get from one piece of content and
discover something else. The more direct connections, the better, kind of like
a wiki, but focused on community provided connections.

It's kind of like when I'm looking for new games for a console and I search
"Top 10 games for blah" and check a bunch of list or "Underappreciated gems
for blah" and check a bunch of lists, hoping for something I haven't seen
before. Well what if there could be associations for just about any aspect of
the content. Maybe the nodes could be auto-weighted based on how many people
follow that connection, so anyone could add a connection, but the most
travelled would rise to the top when a bunch of people click on it, possibly
with some sort of extinction.

Anyway, it'll probably never materialize, it's just something that's been
rolling around in my mind for awhile.

~~~
kanso
Doesn't this sort of already exist? Dribbble for instance, you can have
followers and usually the top artist have tons of activity through comments on
their content. You can easily find these top artists through their search
filters.

~~~
cableshaft
No, not really. That's more of a standard web 2.0 approach to content, almost
like Tumblr, from what I can see (likes and comments probably wouldn't be a
thing in what I'm invisioning, for example, although following updates to the
page probably would be). And I don't literally mean "Top 20 most popular
whatever", as existing portals do that already, as it's easy to do a database
query and order it based by views, or sales, or whatever.

I'm saying I currently watch like 15 different top 20 lists from a bunch of
sources just trying to find the 4 or 5 unique items because they all tend to
mention the same stuff except one or two things. I'm trying to find the more
obscure or weird stuff that's still good, not just the most popular.

What I have in mind is where the focus is more on the connections between two
specific pieces of content, that goes beyond a general recommendation engine
and the connection can be based on many things. A tag doesn't fall under that
category because it will just list anything that matches that tag (although a
focus on tagging is at least better than what the Apple App Store has now, for
example), and the tags are usually decided by the content creator, not other
people who might see a connection that even the author might not.

I'm thinking more like on Wikipedia, where you read one subject, then on that
subject you find a link to something else you're curious about, and go there,
and then on that page you find something and go somewhere else, etc. The
connections are community driven (each connection can be strengthened or
weakened by the users), and the reason for the connection can be whatever is
provided by the user that made the suggested connection.

Additionally, I'm thinking of using a metaphor more like exhibits in a virtual
museum instead of 'hey, i made this thing, come look at it!'. The creator
isn't necessarily the person who 'curates' the exhibit, or at least not the
only person. Museum might not be a hip enough to attract people, so there
might be presented differently, but the idea is a lasting place people can go
to find out about that content and a bunch of links linking to it and from it
from other content on the site for all sorts of reasons.

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onion2k
Look for pain. Listen to people complaining. Measure things and look for
repetition. Those things are sources of easily identified problems (but not
necessarily easy solutions).

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miguelrochefort
Let me tell you about my issue.

There are too many apps and websites. This makes life so complex. I want a
one-stop interface that let me do everything.

Build it and you will win.

~~~
randomnumber314
Isn't that what AOL and Yahoo did?

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JSeymourATL
> come up with a meaningful project to take on.

Three areas to explore -

1) What are the most important problems in your field?

2) Are you working on ONE of them?

3) Why not?

On this subject, Richard Hamming offers excellent advice >
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw)

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hbcondo714
I've used up-for-grabs.net to help find open source projects that have open
issues to work on.

~~~
kanso
This is awesome, thanks! Are there more sites like this?

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Mz
Do volunteer work. Start a new hobby. Read things different from what you
usually read. Etc.

You need to a) feed your mind/feed your creative engine and b) put yourself in
contact with new problems.

