For me it usually stops when I mentally calculate how much work it requires, and I realize I’d rather just play video games.
If you’re looking for original ideas… I have bad news for you
They come from unique problems
Guess that depends on what your goal is. Are you doing it for fun? Or for money? If it’s the latter it’s all in the marketing.
Steve Jobs said “you don’t have to do it better, just different”.
Turns out that fruit doesn’t cure cancer either
Yeah Apple’s marketing is incredible
Most times I find that these projects are either old or badly made (often both). If you’re inspired and you feel like you can make them better, then go for it.
An artist isn’t going to refrain from painting a portrait of a dog if other artists have already painted dog portraits, so why should you?
Then a while later you go back and look at what you did and realize it’s old and badly made.
Then you pat yourself on the back for inspiring the next dev that comes across your project
or you realize that the idea fundamentally wouldnt work. i wanted to build a lemmy music recognition bot until i remembered lemmy has no videos lmao
That doesn’t stop the Javascript frameworks.
Instead, you can try to extend the existing project with new features, possibly improving your code reading skills and discovering new practices
I’ve built little things that already have a solution when that other solution either didn’t do it the way I had in mind or did more things than I needed it to. It really depends on how you’re valuing your time and knowledge/experience in the end.
Sometimes starting from someone else’s code and stripping only to the functions you need is fun!
That’s how you find that one variable that isn’t used anywhere but breaks everything if you remove it.
Then you fill the fucking code with print statements because you don’t know to use debug, realize the variable feeds some stupid fucking function that does nothing but has to be there and a few hours later comment out said print statements and just re add the variable.
You know, it occurs to me that doing that with print really isn’t any different than the accepted method of debug logging other than where the output is directed to.
Try to add 100+ things to make it very big project, then dropped without even completing 10% of to-do list.
Eventually you get a better idea to start the same project from scratch, then drop it.
If it sounded cool to do, I do it anyway, and keep it to myself. Never have to clean that shit up. Unfinished? Who gives a fuck, I did it, job sorted.
If it sounded like it needed to exist… thank god, someone else did it for me! Not my problem. git clone, next idea.
Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.
This is a great perspective. I have definitely fallen into this meme’s sentiment many times. You have to remind yourself that it doesn’t matter.
A project doesn’t have to be unique as a whole. You can always take an already existing idea and add your own twist to it (new UI, new feature, better optimisation, etc). What’s important is actually doing something instead of being stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorming idea.
Learning is the main point of taking on a side project. Whether it’s original or not doesn’t matter
I came up with idea where instead of typing stuff like “5/6” “6*9” into the terminal, you could have gui interface.
