
Ask HN: What full-time self-project should I do in 2018? - floatingdev
[Throw-away for obvious reasons; on HN since 2012; 25 years old]
I&#x27;m one of you who hangs out on HN&#x2F;PH&#x2F;Reddit. I joined CS in 2011, then dropped out to start freelancing (because I couldn&#x27;t pay college fees) in 2013. After three years, in late 2016 I quit freelancing, and since then I&#x27;ve been building utility apps and simple mobile games for the last two years. Some of my apps are bringing me Ad revenue; combined revenue from my projects might sustain me for a couple of years.<p>By working in dozens of small-scale projects, I have gained a diverse range of skills; I&#x27;m pretty good at Unity3D, image manipulation using C++, native mobile apps, system&#x2F;server administration (setting up web&#x2F;mail&#x2F;database servers and containers). Since I have had a passive revenue stream, I find myself spending a lot less time working; I just spend most of my time reading articles on Medium&#x2F;HN&#x2F;PH and tinkering with new technology, without any motive of commitment with any of those (take blockchain and flutter as two examples).<p>My apps might support me for 9-12 months without actively maintaining them. Personally I&#x27;d like to involve myself in a project that doesn&#x27;t only involve writing CRUD and APIs. I&#x27;m pretty burnt out of all these stuff. I feel I&#x27;m doing the mindless programming even if I&#x27;m solving interesting problems in a while. I think I&#x27;m not working on something important enough, and will soon lose my passion for development. To fix this I have thought of three options-<p>i. help the open source community, because without it I&#x27;d probably be selling peanuts in the railway station,<p>ii. start working on to hardware&#x2F;IOT with a lot of learning (Logic, Computer architecture, signals, boards, basic electrical, etc.)<p>iii. work on a technology that is promising, as well as interesting enough for coming years, like ML&#x2F;AI&#x2F;DL<p>I&#x27;m not a native speaker of english, and belong to the 3rd world country in South-East Asia, please pardon my ignorance of language. What would you suggest?
======
njsubedi
Instead of just browsing the internet you could fix any issues that you found
in libraries you used quite often, or help improve the libraries that helped
your build your apps in the first place. This will make you feel like you’re
working on something important.

AFAIK many open source contributors started by supporting the projects they
are already familiar with as they know how the library would be used. That
would be a good start until you find something else to do.

(Edit: typo)

------
HNNewer
Stick with the 1. option. Look for open issues on GitHub/GitLab and start
contributing with whatever you feel pleased of.

You'll gain new friends, find a mentor and learn new skills, even soft ones.

Tip: try with some Linux distribution (Manjaro, Ubuntu, etc.)

